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  • From: evraire AT tuwg.com
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [SM-Discuss] Security discussion: stack smash protection
  • Date: 27 Sep 2004 18:38:39 -0000

Hey everyone,
I just happened upon a very interesting thread in the Gent** forums[1] and
learned about a very nifty feature in gcc called "stack smash protection",
enabled by the -fstack-protector or -fstack-protector-all compiler flags.
This feature can protect an application from most buffer overflow attacks,
even for unknown vulnerabilities. I wonder whether we have support for these
compiler flags in Source Mage, and if not I would really like to see it added
in.

Apparently there is a small performance hit in the application depending on
how much string manipulation it performs, so while adding it to the sorcery
menu as a global on/off switch is possible I think it would be best to
enable/disable this on a per-spell basis. For example, I don't think I would
care whether or not MPlayer uses this (as I personally don't stream too much
content from the Net), but I would like all my public servers (MySQL, Apache,
PHP, SSH, etc.) to be compiled with this extra layer of protection.

I am writing this to all of you in the interest of starting a discussion
about this and other possible security measures we can add to our
distribution. So please, if you have any thoughts about this, I invite you
to chime in.

I'm providing a few links[2-6], mostly about the stack smash protection
feature but some are simply related. All of these links were extracted from
the Gent** thread (but it's not an exhaustive list by far).

Looking forward to what people have to say!

Jonathan Evraire
evraire at tuwg.com


[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/21468
[2] http://www.trl.ibm.com/projects/security/ssp/main.html
[3]
http://www.research.ibm.com/trl/projects/security/ssp/node5.html#SECTION00051000000000000000
[4]
http://www.ida.liu.se/~johwi/research_publications/paper_ndss2003_john_wilander.pdf
[5] http://www.research.avayalabs.com/project/libsafe/
[6] http://dev.gentoo.org/~vapier/mudflap.pdf


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