[2607.03056] A Measurement Study on the Adoption of Pledges and Unveils in the OpenBSD Operating System

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arXiv:2607.03056 (cs)

[Submitted on 3 Jul 2026]

Title:A Measurement Study on the Adoption of Pledges and Unveils in the OpenBSD Operating System

Authors:Jukka Ruohonen, Krzysztof Sierszecki, Abhishek Tiwari<br>View a PDF of the paper titled A Measurement Study on the Adoption of Pledges and Unveils in the OpenBSD Operating System, by Jukka Ruohonen and 2 other authors

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Abstract:The paper presents a longitudinal measurement study on the adoption of the pledge and unveil system calls in OpenBSD. These system calls are used to sandbox programs and libraries. Given a dataset covering 19 releases, many programs and libraries were modified to use the system calls already before their introductions in official releases. The adoption rates have also steadily grown; a linear trend provides a coarse but sensible heuristic. Although particularly programs residing in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin have been modified to use the system calls, the sizes of programs and libraries do not correlate well with the amounts of pledge and unveil system calls invoked. Regarding the pledges made, standard input and output operations have frequently been requested, although the full fine-grained arsenal offered by pledge has generally been utilized in OpenBSD. The same observation is seen in that particularly read operations to given paths have frequently been unveiled. All in all, the measurement results indicate that the adoption of system call minimization and sandboxing techniques is not necessarily as troublesome as has often been discussed in the literature.

Comments:<br>Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER 2026), Limassol, IEEE, pp. 1-6

Subjects:

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2607.03056 [cs.SE]

(or<br>arXiv:2607.03056v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.03056

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Related DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER67736.2026.00118

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Submission history<br>From: Jukka Ruohonen [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Fri, 3 Jul 2026 07:46:06 UTC (168 KB)

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