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Date:      Tue, 23 Apr 2002 03:21:46 -0700
From:      David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU>
To:        "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        Jochem Kossen <j.kossen@home.nl>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Security through obscurity? (was: ssh + compiled-in SKEY support considered harmful?)
Message-ID:  <20020423032146.A490@HAL9000.wox.org>
In-Reply-To: <20020423183452.M6425@wantadilla.lemis.com>; from grog@FreeBSD.ORG on Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 06:34:52PM %2B0930
References:  <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG> <11670.1019530386@winston.freebsd.org> <20020423131646.I6425@wantadilla.lemis.com> <200204231009.51297.j.kossen@home.nl> <20020423183452.M6425@wantadilla.lemis.com>

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Thus spake Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.ORG>:
> work done.  And you can bet your bottom dollar that somebody coming
> from another UNIX variant and trying out FreeBSD won't do so.  They'll
> just say that it's broken and wander off again.

I agree with this point, in general.  FreeBSD shouldn't be like
OpenBSD, where everything is so secure by default that you can't get
anything done.  For example, most people who use X don't know---and
don't want to know---how it works.  If the defaults are too
restrictive, they will be frustrated, and maybe they'll figure out how
to make things unrestrictive without understanding what's going on.

On the other hand, if the defaults are not cautious enough, the same
people will need to apply patches when the next remotely exploitable
hole in X is found, and many of them won't bother.  I'm a bit more
wary of third-party applications, particularly big ones like X, so
disabling TCP connections by default seems like a reasonable thing to
do.  But it should have been documented in a place where people
actually look when they upgrade.

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