RE: grsecurity: Another one bites the dust...

[<Glenn_Everhart () bankone com>]

Anybody know what the patent claims are?

Some of the descriptions of grsecurity sound an awful lot like technology
I developed for VMS and published in the late 1990s in the Safety
program (still available, free) or documented as trivial extensions (rate limits).

A brief description of the Safety program is at http://users.rcn.com/gce
in case there is a wish to see what it has in a very limited way. It assumes
the VMS ACL system of course, and some of the other security goodness in VMS,
but gets fairly tricky in other ways.

The rate limiting idea was something I have described as a useful feature for
at least the past 6-7 years and can be found here and there in my mails and
some bits of publications (DECUS sigtapes mainly).

At any rate, it is possibly prior art and publication, and was certainly
released to the public and should be useful in defending claims that functions
it provides could be patented by someone else.

At one time I wanted to sell Safety, but gave up on that and just published the
sources several years ago. The documents had been published when it was first
implemented (along about 1995). 

While there is a bunch of other stuff in grsecurity that is not in Safety
it is probably worth while to keep aware of what has been published (even in
publications that (alas) seem to have narrow circulation) so that if someone
claims patents on some of those functions, the patents can be disputed.

Glenn Everhart


-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff [mailto:jeff () xiir net]
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2003 10:14 PM
To: full-disclosure () lists netsys com
Subject: [Full-disclosure] grsecurity: Another one bites the dust...


http://www.grsecurity.net

Looks like another big company screwed over a team of innocent developers.
It's a shame, grsecurity had so much promise.

Figures.

-jeff
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