Contributed by Peter N. M. Hansteen on from the protecting-the-full-stack dept.
miod@) tells the story of the early stack protection work on OpenBSD.
This is also part of the early history of OpenBSD development, when Miod relates that the project
starts switching its mindset from ``our work is to make the code bug-free'' to ``in addition to making the code bug-free, we should make exploitation as difficult as possible''.
The article provides fair measure of detail about how the OpenBSD developers made the Propolice mechanism portable across all supported architectures (including the now-retired OpenBSD/vax).
As the article notes, the name Propolice is no longer commonly used, but it denotes an important step in the efforts to make OpenBSD and other systems run on secure and correct code.
The full article, titled The story of Propolice, is well worth your time for filling in gaps in the history of our favorite codebase.
(Comments are closed)
By Noah Altun (naltun) noah@altun.cc on
Great read. Thanks to Miod for taking the time to write the post.
By Mihai David (mihai) on
Interesting read.