Posted by flipped 19 hours ago
2. Bsds don’t have the same optimizations that Linux has. Bsds generally try to pursue corrrectness
That being said there were just a bunch of vulnerabilities in freebsd
macOS has had its own dirty cow attack and I know there’s for sure more memory ones just based on the way the xnu kernel works.
So no Linux isn’t really worse per say
- more people are using it (assuming macos is in its own bucket perhaps) - bigger surface areas (esp NetBSD has in my limited understanding just less stuff that can go boom) - more churn, ie more new stuff than can be buggy released more often.
Of course, because of that, more eyes are on Linux, so I'm not sure where that security tradeoff is.
An LPE only allows an attacker who can already execute code on the system to become root. So, bad, yes, but it doesn't mean you are immediately pwned.
I would assume AWS is pretty on the ball when it comes to handling stuff like this if they didn't have other defenses or mitigations in place already.