OpenBSD Attack Mitigations - Alexander Bluhm - EuroBSDcon 2023
Channel: EuroBSDcon
Date: 2023-10-02

Alexander Bluhm:  OpenBSD Attack Mitigations 
The environment for userland application in OpenBSD tries to be an unpleasant place for attackers. Most of the binary exploitation mitigation are listed on http://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html . This talk will give a deeper insight in a bunch of them. What kind of attacks should they stop and how do mitigations work together?

These OpenBSD features were not written all at once, they evolved during the past 20 years. What was necessary to implement them, and what had to be done that modern POSIX compatible software runs fine on OpenBSD? You have to hit the small line between things that 3rd party software expects, and the ABI allows to do. There was a lot of pain for the ports maintainers to fix the fallout.

Alexander Bluhm:
Alexander Bluhm is an OpenBSD developer since 2007. His main area of work is the network stack. In the recent years focus was on multi processor performance. He is employed at genua, a German firewall manufacturer, who is using OpenBSD an a secure and stable base for its products. Other areas of interest are the errata process, testing, maintaining Perl ports, and fixing all kinds of bugs.