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CVE-2026-42511 Breakdown: RCE in FreeBSD

26 points by mmsc

by zbentley

0 subcomment

That’s … unfortunate. I had previously assumed that an OS with as solid a reputation as FreeBSD would not do questionable things like “have core network protocols store externally-supplied structured data using ad hoc file serialization” (SQLite, Berkeley DB, JSON, TOML, and many more alternatives exist) and “shell eval data/configs on the data path.”
If confirmed, that last part is particularly a bummer. Having shell functionality on the data path of … well, anything as critical as DHCP seems like a poor choice. Considering it appropriate to use shell eval there seems like such a poor choice as to reflect poorly on the whole system.