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Hi everyone, |
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|
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Magnus (aka Zorry) and I have been talking about what to do with PaX in |
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the Gentoo tree. A year ago, grsecurity.net upstream stopped providing |
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open versions of their patches to the community and this basically |
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brought an end to sys-kernel/hardened-sources. I waited a while before |
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masking the package in the hope that upstream might reconsider. There |
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were also some forks but I didn't have much confidence in them. I'm not |
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sure that any of these forks have been able to keep up past |
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meltdown/specter. |
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|
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It may be time to remove sys-kernel/hardened-sources completely from the |
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tree. Removing the package is easy, but the issue is there is a lot of |
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machinery in the tree that revolves around supporting a PaX kernel. |
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This involves things like setting PaX flags on some executables either |
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by touching the ELF program headers or the file's extended attributes, |
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or applying custom patches. |
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The question then is, do we remove all this code? As thing stands, its |
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just lint that serves no current purpose, so removing it would clean |
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things up. The disadvantage is it would be a pita to ever restore it if |
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we ever wanted it back. While upstream doesn't provide their patch for |
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free, some users/companies can purchase the grsecurity patches and still |
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use a custom hardened-sources kernel with Gentoo. But since we haven't |
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been able to test the pax markings/custom patches in about a year, its |
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hard to say how useful that code might still be. |
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I'm just emailing everyone to get advice. |
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-- |
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Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D. |
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Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened] |
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E-Mail : blueness@g.o |
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GnuPG FP : 1FED FAD9 D82C 52A5 3BAB DC79 9384 FA6E F52D 4BBA |
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GnuPG ID : F52D4BBA |
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