Ten-year-old bug discovered in OpenBSD

By admin On Oct 7, 2014

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A bug has been discovered in the open source operating system OpenBSD that has been in the code for ten years. Attackers could exploit the flaw to perform ddos attacks on servers.

The bug was discovered in OpenBSD’s polling subsystem, Phoronix writes. The bug allows an attacker to perform ddos attacks on servers using manipulated file descriptors. The discoverers describe the bug as ‘critical’, but the flaw is said to have been present in OpenBSD’s source code since February 2004. In Linux, the error would not be present. A bug fix is currently being worked on.

It’s striking that a bug described as critical could have gone undetected in OpenBSD’s source code for so long; the operating system is advertised by the developers as a very secure OS by paying close attention to properly written code and the security mechanisms in the operating system.