nanog mailing list archives

Re: DARPA and the network


From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Tue, 06 Sep 2005 14:03:42 -0400

On Tue, 06 Sep 2005 11:35:22 +0200, Henning Brauer said:

(Off-topic, but needs correcting...)

so if the BSDs are en par with preventive measures, why is OpenBSD (to 
my knowledge) the only one shipping ProPolice, which prevented 
basically any buffer overflow seen in the wild for some time now?

Not familiar with ProPolice, but much of Fedora is compiled with the
FORTIFY_SOURCE option, which presumably does similar stuff?

Why is OpenBSD the only one to have randomized library loading, 
rendering basicaly all exploits with fixed offsets unuseable?
Why is OpenBSD the only one to have W^X, keeping memory pages writeable 
_or_ executable, but not both, unless an application fixes us to (by 
respective mprotect calls)?

See the ExecShield stuff in RedHat/Fedora, or the Pax patch in grsecurity,
which both address these two points.

There's probably more systems running a Linux with one of these than OpenBSD.

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