Re: [gentoo-hardened] Keeping gentoo-hardened alive

On Sze, Február 13, 2008 06:07, Geoff Kassel wrote:
>
> No problems. My background in QA is primarily regression testing and code
> quality reviews (although it's been ages since I've done any of this with
> C) - my formal methods background is formal specification, model checking,
> theorem proving, and formal derivation of code from formal specification.
> (Yes, I'm a recovering academic :)

It would be a good strategy IMHO to recruit graduates to work on security
stuff. It's a really fascinating topic to immerse in the depth of the
toolchain and its security features - for a passionate graduate. Of course
it requires a supervisor...

>
> While I'm dreaming I'd also like to do something about making GRSEC easier
> to
> set up (an upstream issue, I know) as it has so much promise, and the

I think grsec would need some kind of configuration mechanism similar to
SELinux. It could be either implemented on a per-ebuild basis or as a base
policy. That could be further extended with additional features according
to the particular box. Using m4 would be a good candidate to generate the
redundant per user stuff. I think many of us could contribute to the
policy. The hardest task would be to agree on the differences regarding
the security requirements. But that could be made configurable also.
Configuration intelligence could investigate the contents of the conf
directory to tailor the policy to the specific settings...

> basic
> configuration isn't nearly as paranoid as I'd like it to be :) and it's
> very
> difficult and time-consuming to make it so. I gave up doing so, and I like
> to
> think I'm not a complete n00b. PaX, PIE and SSP are practically
> fire-and-forget in comparison.

I have to regularly revise my policy to keep the box running. I've also
ended up loosening the security in order to make the system usable.

>
> Speaking of PaX, another great, impossible thing would be to have a
> kernel-level feature for handling PaX violations in a less violent manner
> (core dumps are violent, in my mind) - perhaps suspension of the process
> in
> question until investigated, with the possibility of resumption or
> termination by someone with sufficient security permissions. (Perhaps I'm
> just unaware of an already existing feature.) Again, an upstream issue.

I think it depends on the type of denial. If it's a textrel, that's not so
serious. However if it's a stack-smashing: I don't want to have a single
piece of those code on my system...

Regards,
Dw.
-- 
dr Tóth Attila, Radiológus Szakorvos jelölt, 06-20-825-8057, 06-30-5962-962
Attila Toth MD, Radiologist in Training, [phone], [phone]


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