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posted by takyon on Sunday July 26 2015, @03:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the hard-mode-os dept.

A relatively new fork of FreeBSD, HardenedBSD, has completed its Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) feature. Without ASLR, applications are loaded into memory in a deterministic manner. An attacker who knows where a vulnerability lies in memory can reliably exploit that vulnerability to manipulate the application into doing the attacker's bidding. ASLR removes the determinism, making it so that even if an attacker knows that a vulnerability exists, he doesn't know where that vulnerability lies in memory. HardenedBSD's particular implementation of ASLR is the strongest form ever implemented in any of the BSDs.

The next step is to update documentation and submit updates to the patches they have already submitted upstream to FreeBSD. ASLR is the first step in a long list of exploit mitigation technologies HardenedBSD plans to implement.


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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday July 27 2015, @11:15AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday July 27 2015, @11:15AM (#214226) Journal
    If you want your money to go towards projects that actually improve security, please consider sending it to the FreeBSD Foundation instead.
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  • (Score: 2) by fnj on Monday July 27 2015, @12:55PM

    by fnj (1654) on Monday July 27 2015, @12:55PM (#214280)

    I already do - not instead, but too. HardenedBSD is "actually improving security". Why would I turn my nose up at them.

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday July 27 2015, @04:21PM

      by TheRaven (270) on Monday July 27 2015, @04:21PM (#214384) Journal

      HardenedBSD is "actually improving security"

      They have so far not produced any code that is of sufficient quality for inclusion in mainline FreeBSD (and the reviews of the ASLR work have involved more time from experienced FreeBSD developers than it would have taken for them to implement ASLR from scratch). Even now, their work causes undiagnosed segfaults in some applications and has neither a solid performance nor security evaluation (it won't be merged until there's a clear understanding of how it interacts with transparent superpage promotion, for example). They also need to do something about the incredibly overengineered user interface for controlling ASLR.

      They have also done some very questionable things in the HardenedBSD tree (e.g. including random number generator patches that were rejected from FreeBSD because they introduced security holes and shipping them for a few months). But if you have infinite money and don't need to prioritise, then feel free to give money to them. It's definitely worth encouraging novice developers to hack on operating systems, but I can think of quite a few people who are more promising. The reviews for the ASLR work public are on FreeBSD's Phabricator instance if you want to see them - you can see that it took several rounds of review to get basic issues fixed.

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