NetBSD Security Enhancements: Recent Developments Overview

Running on almost twenty different architectures, and easily portable to others, NetBSD gained its reputation as the most portable operating system on the planet. While that may indicate high quality code, the ever demanding networked world cares about more than just that. Over the past year, NetBSD evolved quite a bit in various areas. This paper, however, will focus on those aspects relating to security. This paper was written and structured to present a full overview of the recent security enhancements in NetBSD in an easily readable and balanced form that will satisfy new, intermediate, and experienced users. References were sprinkled across the text to provide more information to those who want more detail, while preserving the continuity.

Following this introduction, the paper is presented in five major sections, spread over eight pages. Section 2 presents the bigger picture of security in NetBSD: how NetBSD perceives security, the design decisions of NetBSD software in general and the security infrastructure and features more specifically. Section 3 presents a detailed overview of the recent enhancements in the security infrastructure and features of NetBSD including, where relevant, details about the design, implementation, and possible future development. Section 4 shows current security-related research and development in NetBSD, and then section 5 discusses how the described enhancements work together to provide a more secure platform. Section 6 concludes the paper, and summarizes the availability of the discussed features.

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