OpenBSD Journal

Theo's slides from auug04 are online now.

Contributed by grey on from the for those who aren't jet setting around the globe dept.

Thanks to Wijnand for writing in with the following:

Theo's slides of his presentation at Auug04 about Exploit Mitigation Techniques are online now.

The presentation is almost the same as the presentation at bsdcan2004, but at some points this presentation gives more details. Maybe this is interesting for some of you.

You can read the slides online.

Update: an article titled De Raadt happy with AUUG conference audience

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Gabriel (200.221.124.40) on

    About the "this is a 3 line change to the kernel. why the other vendors have not picked up on this?"

    I think that 3 lines executed everytime there's memory manipulation are some damn important 3 lines to begin with and should never be reduced to "mere 3 lines"

    after all, i could put some print hello word on the begining of the same function. It would be a ONE line change to the kernel. :)

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on

      If you don't understand what is being said, don't critisize. Its not 3 lines executed every time there is memory manipulated, its once per process invocation. How often do you think stacks are created? And the performance impact of such a tiny change is small enough to call it non-existant.

    2. By tedu (66.93.171.98) on

      1. if you enter the kernel for *any* reason, you've already executed way more then 3 lines of code.
      2. calling printf just for the hell of it adds no functionality.
      3. calling printf in the kernel executes way more than 3 lines of code, regardless of the "diff" size.

      Comments

      1. By tedu (66.93.171.98) on

        then/than. oops.

      2. By Anonymous Coward (65.222.158.132) on

        printf is not in kernel

        Comments

        1. By djm@ (61.95.66.134) on

          yes it is.

        2. By tedu (66.93.171.98) on

          yet another winner who doesn't know how to use grep.

    3. By Anonymous Coward (130.233.220.23) on

      Other vendors don't want to waste memory or randomize memory locations. It's such a trick that only OpenBSD wants. OpenBSD is in C, which is unsafe. Security can be improved with a safe language, and then you don't need a bag of tricks. W^X is good, and that's why other vendors also use it.

      Comments

      1. By tedu (67.127.55.173) on

        i'm curious to know what OS you use, and what language it's written in.

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (130.233.220.23) on

          Using Linux and it's written in C. I tried to install OpenBSD but the darn SCSI adapter was not supported by any of *bsd.

          I was thinking more like that, mail server, httpd, etc. could be written in a safe language.

          BSD licensed Java, anyone knows? ;)

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (195.217.242.33) on

            and Java is written in C ( and java )

  2. By Anonymous Coward (68.165.27.173) on

    Theo seems to know a bit of openbsd, but he still has to learn a lot. Here at Microsoft, our security model is more 'than 3 lines of code' we ensure a full protection of windows, it's nothing like a simple patch or whatever weird W+X useless unix techonolgy, which is probably, just like linux illegal because of a violation of patents (refer to the SCO case.)

    Comments

    1. By SH (82.182.103.172) on

      Is that you again Chuck Buckley? At the misc mailinglist it was suggested that you first try learn trolling at a private mailinglist, and this goes for forums as well. /SH

    2. By Anonymous Coward (207.46.238.133) on

      dude, NX *is* W^X for windows, hardly a weird unix tech

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