HardenedBSD in BSDMag ....

Hi folks,

The "little something" I said while ago was the article I have written for BSDMag, explaining the goals of HardenedBSD and talking about its main feature, Address Space Layout Randomisation. For who does not wish to register, it can be viewed here ... Was a guenine pleasure to write it :-)

Hardened BSD, ASLR + PIE, and so forth ...

Hi folks,

What happened to me recently it s basically "a dream comes true" ... kind of.
Indeed, Shawn Webb (and Oliver Pinter), the men behind Hardened BSD (which is originally to bring proper ASLR support on FreeBSD), wrote me that :

"
Hey David,

Oliver and I would like to add you as a direct contributor to the
HardenedBSD project. We've looked over your pull requests and have been
impressed with your code. Would you like to become an official developer
for the project?

Thanks,
"

Even after nearly 14 years of experience, I was quite shaked by those words, coming from an important person. I extended the goal of HardenedBSD by also providing security fixes in the base userland and he trusted me since the beginning. So I m thankful for his generosity, I won't forget ;-).
It existed before some unofficial ASLR projects but as you can easily mess up things, I did not trust much. But when I first heard about Shawn's work I said to myself "Yes he got it right!", then I saw his interview I was convinced ...

So for next, I m trying to provide optional hardening ptrace calls and will see what will come next.
As it is quite time consuming, I ll probably give much less time to some other projects but this is life !

ASLR on FreeBSD

Hi folks.
During my free time I wanted to see the "status" of BSD and decided to dedicate an old laptop for OpenBSD. It is worthy, apart of its secure reputation, nothing fancy installed, everything is consistent and rocks solid.

The ASLR implementation is quite good and helpful to detect some "nasty" hidden bugs :-) and with MALLOC_STATS enabled (thanks Mr Moerbeek ... OpenBSD does not have Valgrind, not yet at least ...) for the memory leaks, I have all I need :-).

Then I checked the ASLR status for FreeBSD, the last BSD without it (I know FreeBSD since 2004 and I expect ASLR implementation on it since those years, while Linux has it since quite long time and it rocks solid ...). Still nothing ! But ... will be for the next 11 branch and can be set on/off not only globally but for a specific jail for example !

Awesome and quite interesting ... I am looking for it.