Minimizing packages

Posted Jun 27, 2007 7:47 UTC (Wed) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
In reply to: Minimizing packages by njs
Parent article: Counting vulnerabilities

You are correct in that USE flags would yield a possibility that one runs programs with unknown holes in them, but then the attacker must also be aware of these unknown holes and also know that you compiled your packages with that very specific USE flags.

Not that it gives a warm and fuzzy feeling, but it would still be some uphill for a potential attacker. And more importantly is that thanks to the wide spread of USE flags a lot of previously unknown bugs will be reported (and hopefully fixed) due to the great variety of the users.