NYCBUG / The New York City BSD Users Group.

05/20/2026

NYC*BUG Meeting June 3rd:
Let's review some OpenBSD mitigations, with Brian Callahan
2026-06-03 @ 18:45 local (22:45 UTC) - Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St

How do we know that security mitigations actually work? How often should we review code to ensure they are continuing to provide?

Following two recent publications, let’s explore some of OpenBSD’s anti-ROP mitigations. We will explore what they do, how to test they work, how to port them to other operating systems, and how to understand larger questions about security mitigations. You’ll leave having a deeper appreciation for OpenBSD’s sustained security track record.

Brian is a long-time face in the *BSD world. While he claims semi-retirement from OpenBSD development, in reality he probably spends even more time on it getting students excited about the BSDs. He is the Director of the Monmouth University Cybersecurity Research Center, where here leads quantum cybers ecurity and other security research.

Nearest NYC Subway is the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue station L, A, C, E.

To get to the backroom, you must enter the front door, follow the long bar on your left, and walk all the way to the back. At the rear of the BrassMonkey, you will see an alcove for the 3 bathrooms our room is off to your right.

Remote participation: Plans are to stream via NYC*BUG website. Q&A will be via IRC on libera.chat channel - please preface your questions with '[Q]'.

05/06/2026

Reminder: The Next NYC*BUG is Wednesday May 13th
The Design of Unix Shell, with Stephen R. Bourne
- Yes, *that Stephen R. Bourne*
2026-05-13 @ 18:45 local (22:45 UTC) - Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St
For more information, please visit:
https://www.nycbug.org/

04/28/2026

For anyone planning to go to BSDCan 2026, please remember early registration period ends this Thursday April 30th. Early registration comes with free ticket to the Saturday reception. Don't miss out! Register today!
https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html

02/06/2026

NYC*BUG March Meeting:
2026-03-04 @ 18:45 local (23:45 UTC) - Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St

Weird Code Injection Techniques on FreeBSD With libhijack.pdf remote presentation, by Shawn Webb

Remote participation: Plans are to stream via NYC*BUG website. Q&A will be via IRC on libera.chat channel - please preface your questions with '[Q]'.

FreeBSD is a widely-used open source operating system, powering your Playstation 4 and 5, Netflix, Juniper dev ices, and many other devices. libhijack is a post-exploitation tool to make code injection easier. In as littl e as four lines of code, developers can inject a complete shared object into another process fully anonymously.

libhijack makes it easy to force the target process to create new anonymous memory mappings, inject code into memory-backed file descriptors, and finally call fdlopen on the memfd.

This presentation walks attendees through various methods in which to stealthily inject code into a target pro cess–some of these methods are new variants of prior work and remain unique to libhijack.

Shawn Webb is the co-founder of the HardenedBSD Project and the founding president of The HardenedBSD Foundati on, a tax-exmpt not-for-profit 501©3 charitable organization in the US. While Shawn has a few decades of exp erience in infosec, both as a profession and a hobby, he considers himself a perpetual newb. He works for IOAc tive, an offensive security company, spending his time finding vulnerabilities in customer products.

While working in the NSA’s backyard, he had the opportunity to be mentored by two interns–an experience that changed his life. He and his interns focused on the intersection of human rights and information security and cybersecurity.

Shawn “lattera” Webb also maintains a post-exploitation tool called libhijack. It makes runtime process infect ion and runtime function hooking for remote processes over the ptrace boundary incredibly simple on FreeBSD.

Nearest NYC Subway is the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue station L, A, C, E.

To get to the backroom, you must enter the front door, follow the long bar on your left, and walk all the way to the back. At the rear of the BrassMonkey, you will see an alcove for the 3 bathrooms our room is off to your right.

More Info: https://www.nycbug.org/

01/24/2026

Video of NYC*BUG bonus meeting:
Video meeting - upcoming 4th edition of The Book of PF, CRA and more, by Peter Hansteen
2026-01-10 @ 13:00 local (18:00 UTC) - at an internet connected computer near you

Peter Hansteen on The Book of PF 4th edition, and doing proper engineering

Peter Hansteen has a new edition of The Book of PF, its fourth, hitting shelves near you just about now. Peter would love to tell you all about the book and how to use the PF toolset properly.

It’s about proper engineering. Which will be on the horizon more than ever in the coming months and years as the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is coming int force. Peter has a teaser presentation about that too, and you’ll see how these themes tie together nicely.

Peter N.M. Hansteen is a DevOps (formerly sysadmin) consultant and writer based in Bergen, Norway. A longtime Freenix advocate, Hansteen is a frequent lecturer on OpenBSD and FreeBSD topics. He also occasionally contributes articles to websites and magazines, and blogs on mainly networking related topics at https://bsdly.blogspot.com/. Hansteen was a participant in the original RFC 1149 implementation team. The Book of PF is an expanded follow-up to his very popular online PF tutorial https://home.nuug.no/~peter/pf/.

Meeting Sldies are available in nycbug.org website.

Event Video

Peertube / Toobnix.org: https://toobnix.org/w/bQPtKXKqJMdeYDbzhrrkEa
Youtube: https://youtu.be/HOCsvcCm1Ec

https://youtu.be/HOCsvcCm1Ec?si=5hid-rDHQOMQxcSI

New York City BSD User Group

01/24/2026

NYC*BUG February Social:
2026-02-04 @ 18:45 local (23:45 UTC) - Backroom of Brass Monkey 55 Little West 12th St

We are having a social meeting to catch up after the holidays. Will bring a few ideas for future meetings, stickers.

https://brassmonkeynyc.com/

Nearest NYC Subway is the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue station L, A, C, E.

To get to the backroom, you must enter the front door, follow the long bar on your left, and walk all the way to the back. At the rear of the BrassMonkey, you will see an alcove for the 3 bathrooms our room is off to your right.

ALL DAY MENU View Menu DRINKS MENU View Menu WEEKEND BRUNCH View Menu We’re Back! Brass Monkey is open for business in our outdoor street cafe, inside one of our three indoor bars and our outdoor roof terrace. Looking for a real New York experience with great food and drinks? We got you! Get in [....

08/27/2024

Next NYC*BUG: Sept. 4th
GEFS: The Long road to Production Use, Ori Bernstein
2024-09-04 @ 18:45 EDT (22:45 UTC) - NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn +

RSVP: Those ethier considering or wishing to attend, a guest list is required by the venue. Please RVSP to rsvp at lists dot nycbug dot org no later than noon localtime, day-of; an acknowledgement will be sent and the email address will be used solely for the purpose of attendance to this meeting's venue.

Remote participation: Plans are to stream via NYC*BUG website. Q&A will be via IRC on libera.chat channel - please preface your questions with '[Q]'.

GEFS: The Long road to Production Use

Since GEFS was announced and discussed, a lot of debugging and stabilization has happened. I'm using it on my laptop. Others are testing it out. But there's still a lot of work to do. Join for an update on it.

More Info:

New York City BSD User Group

07/30/2024

Next NYC*BUG Meeting: Aug 7th @ 18:45:

"Once again, I've done something no one asked for": New (and old!) C/C++ compilers for your next *BSD adventure: a tale of advocacy: and a sub-sub-subtitle to drum up intrigue, Brian Callahan
2024-08-07 @ 18:45 EDT (22:45 UTC) - NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn +
RSVP: Those ethier considering or wishing to attend, a guest list is required by the venue. Please RVSP to rsvp at lists dot nycbug dot org no later than noon localtime, day-of; an acknowledgement will be sent and the email address will be used solely for the purpose of attendance to this meeting's venue.
Remote participation: Plans are to stream via NYC*BUG website. Q&A will be via IRC on libera.chat channel - please preface your questions with '[Q]'.

At NYCBSDCon 2007, a talk titled "BSD is Dying" took the world by storm. Two years later at DCBSDCon 2009, we got the follow-up "BSD is (Still) Dying." A year later, "BSD Needs Books" was presented at NYCBSDCon 2010, followed up with "BSD Breaking Barriers" at NYCBSDCon 2014.

These excellent presentations fall into what I call "BSD advocacy for everyone" talks. That is, talks that can get anyone excited about joining the *BSD community and fully bringing themselves and their skills and gifts to our little piece of human history. But the most recent of the talks above is a decade old at this point. What should a "BSD advocacy for everyone" talk look like in 2024? How ought we communicate the value of the software and ourselves to the broader world today?

Come with me on an exciting journey on how I wrangled the proprietary Oracle Developer Studio and Intel oneAPI DPC++/C++ compilers to run on FreeBSD and NetBSD and output native binaries for those operating systems. This journey is interesting to our question of "*BSD advocacy for everyone" by highlighting the power of the BSDs, the flexibility to undertake and excel at any task you might throw at them, and how many of the perceived problems those on the outside might feel "hold us back" are social, not technical, in nature, and how we can lead in turning the tide on outsiders' thinking in myriads of easy and small, large, and in-between ways.

This talk will leave you with more than a few laughs, insights on "porting" proprietary software to the BSDs, and energized to be a *BSD advocate in your communities.

More Info:

New York City BSD User Group

07/05/2024

Next NYC*BUG: July 10th 2024:
The State of Email, by Michael W. Lucas
2024-07-10 @ 18:45 EDT (22:45 UTC) - NYU Tandon Engineering Building (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
More Info:

New York City BSD User Group

03/01/2021

April NYC*Bug Meeting announcement:2021-04-07

HardenedBSD 2021 State of the Hardened Union, by Shawn Webb

Over the last few years, since the last State of the Hardened Union, HardenedBSD has made strides in several areas. We're now focused as a hardened human rights-focused operating system. This presentation will dive into recent developments of the OS itself along with our focus on human rights. We'll highlight some unique areas where HardenedBSD is
being used in production.
For Google meeting details, email to rsvp AT lists.nycbug.org, and details
will be sent on the day of the meeting.

More info: https://www.nycbug.org/index?action=view&id=10682

New York City BSD User Group