OpenBSD - Episode 1
For years I’ve heard about the mythical, OpenBSD.
While getting my Master’s Degree in Information Security, one of my professors remarked, “Out of the box, OpenBSD is widely considered to be the most secure operating system.”
The home page of the OpenBSD site clearly, and proudly claims: “ Only two remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years!”
Sounds impressive. Secunia shows that of the 189 advisories it reported from 2003 to 2008 for Microsoft Windows XP Professional, 61% were remote exploits.
Sixty-one percent! That’s 115 in just over 4 years!
The skeptic in me says, well, how many OpenBSD installs are there, relative to the number of XP installs. The bigger the install base, the more attractive the target.
But still. The seed had been planted.
I needed to try this thing out for myself!
I’ve toyed around with Linux since the late 90’s, but hadn’t used a Unix system since before that.
I have been stuck in Microsoft shops since ‘99 :/
But the power of virtualization has now made it possible for me to kick the tires of this mythical beast, and see how it responds.
In my next post, getting up-and-running with OpenBSD and VMWare Server.
For those who can’t wait, here’s my browser’s User Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; OpenBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080310 Firefox/2.0.0.12
So, it works :)