3 ms·
> From a security standpoint, when you find an invalid access, and you mitigate it, you've done a great job, and your hardening was successful and you're done.
by sandGorgon 9y ago
> From a security standpoint, when you find an invalid access, and you
mitigate it, you've done a great job, and your hardening was
successful and you're done. "Look ma, it's not a security issue any
more", and you can basically ignore it as "just another bug" that is
now in a class that is no longer your problem.
So to you, the big win is when the access is _stopped_. That's the end
of the story from a security standpoint - at least if you are one of
those bad security people who don't care about anything else.
But from a developer standpoint, things _really_ are not done. Not
even close. From a developer standpoint, the bad access was just a
symptom, and it needs to be reported, and debugged, and fixed, so that
the bug actually gets corrected.
As a developer, I do want the report. But if you killed the user
program in the process, I'm actually _less_ likely to get the report,
because the latent access was most likely in some really rare and
nasty case, or we would have found it already.
I dont think Linus has an invalid point there. Taken from his previous thread - https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg2540934.html https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg2540934.html
> Don't bother with grsecurity.
Their approach has always been "we don't care if we break anything,
we'll just claim it's because we're extra secure".
He is worried that grsecurity does not play nice with the kernel in a way of "let's make security hardening obsolete by fixing bugs in the kernel".
- jbangert 9y agoFixing all memory corruption bugs is infeasible without fundamentally changing the way Linux is developed. There is so much code (and it’s being added to, changed, etc.) written by humans that make mistakes. There will always be some bugs that are in between being discovered (by someone, maybe malicious, maybe not), and being fixed. How else do you prevent against vulnerabilities in that stage?
- banachtarski 9y agoLinus' response is that calling it an infeasible problem is a cop-out. The right way to go about it is to fix them all, incrementally if need be, and not break userland in the process.
- unityByFreedom 9y agoThese comments sound analogous to real world security and societal issues. Like, the desire to increase army size and addressing the underlying issues. One is a short term solution, the other long term.
- fsloth 9y agoI think given the quantity of our planetary computation infrastructure Linux runs, it's very much a real world issue.