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Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 15:14:34 -0800
From: Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>
To: "kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com" <kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com>
Subject: Re:
On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 9:33 PM, Daniel Micay <danielmicay@...il.com> wrote:
> On 15/11/15 03:59 PM, Richard Weinberger wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 4:43 PM, west suhanic <west.suhanic@...il.com> wrote:
>>> Hello All:
>>>
>>> I am a hardened gentoo user. How can we get the grsecurity code into the
>>> kernel?
>>
>> As soon all downsides and drawbacks are identified/resolved.
>> Which basically means that we have to redo a lot (it not all).
>
> You might not be familiar with the grsecurity/PaX features and their
> implementations but lots of people are. It's not unexplored territory
> without known trade-offs. It has active developers who are happy to
> answer questions about it (within reason).
>
> I think there's little that would need to be redone. There are many
> things that would need to be renamed and refactored in order to present
> them in a different light to deal with political issues. One good way to
> upstream stuff would be presenting it from the angle that it's useful
> for finding kernel bugs for *everyone* and just accepting that some of
> it is going to be misrepresented (i.e. CONFIG_DEBUG_*).
>
> Approaching this as if it's a technical issue is only going to lead to
> failure. I really can't see Linus and others being okay with any GCC
> plugins with alterations to the semantics of C rather than just codegen
> like the KERNEXEC plugin. Dropping time into extracting stuff like that
> rather than realistic things seems wasteful. If someone puts in the
> effort to do it, submits it and hits a wall then I wouldn't expect them
> to be motivated to do more.
That's precisely what my Kernel Summit presentation was doing: trying
to convince people that we need to look beyond just bugs, and to
accept the technical burden of these features (and their
infrastructure) the protect end-users. I think a lot of developers are
more convinced of that now, which is why this project exists. I don't
think our time is wasted any more: we can address the technical issues
finally, without having to fight as hard a social battle to see them
upstreamed.
> I think there's plenty that could be landed but going directly upstream
> may not be the way to go. I was considering spending time on doing most
> of the small features and submitting them to AOSP. No politics to deal
AOSP isn't enough, and even if people did submit them there, I would
be one of the AOSP reviewers asking that they be upstreamed instead.
;)
> with there, only technical issues. If something lands there, it becomes
> a lot easier to upstream it because it becomes part of trying to get
> Android to use a vanilla kernel. Android wants security features and
> Linux isn't delivering, so it might as well start diverging more. For
> example, they recently started improving their ASLR implementation
> towards matching PaX (not there yet). I'm sure they'd take features like
> USERCOPY as-is.
Sure, but those userspace ASLR improvements are being developed
_upstream_. They started their life as a proof-of-concept in AOSP, but
I (and others) who reviewed it there asked that it be taken upstream
first.
-Kees
--
Kees Cook
Chrome OS Security
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