HardenedBSD and the Offset2lib Attack
6 December, 2014 - 12:45 — latteraThe recently disclosed offset2lib attack against Linux's default ASLR implementation has generated a lot of chatter. As mentioned in the paper, ASLR implementations based off of PaX's--which is the case for HardenedBSD--are generally secured against this attack. Our whitepaper describes how we calculate separate offsets for the execution base, mmap, and the stack. For Position-Independent Executables (PIEs), the shared objects have a different randomization offset than the executable itself.
While HardenedBSD is secure against this particular attack, further additions to our implementation can help strengthen it. Since each shared object is randomized with the same delta, the same attack could theoretically be carried out in between libraries. Research is being done in HardenedBSD to randomize the base address of each shared object independent of the other shared objects. This would strengthen HardenedBSD against similar attacks. Additional research is being done to randomize the load order of shared libraries as well. OpenBSD does this to further frustrate an attacker as he or she will not be able to know beforehand in which order the libraries will be loaded.
Crowdfunding HardenedBSD Development Server
31 October, 2014 - 20:46 — latteraWe're working hard to bring the FreeBSD community (and the Internet community as a whole) many security enhancements. We're looking to build an automated infrastructure along with providing our developers a system to do dedicated development on. We're paying everything out of pocket and our expenses are quite high, even as a new project. As such, we've started a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for a dedicated development server. If you want to see HardenedBSD succeed and be given public credit for that help, please head over to the Indiegogo page and give a donation. Even if you can't donate, we'd love it if you could spread the word. We need all the help we can get. We deeply appreciate all the help and support the community has already given us.
Organizational Changes Coming, Feedback Requested
23 October, 2014 - 16:09 — RaTWe're currently planning some organizational changes as well as trying to figure out where we should focus our work. Feel free to comment on this news post with things you would like to see. We're planning to bring some contests either late this month or early next month. Last but not least, we have a poll about hosting a weekly or monthly IRC chat where members of SX will answer any question you have. Please click here and let us know if you would attend such an event.
Site Enhancements
27 September, 2014 - 12:24 — RaTJust a heads up that we've completed a few site enhancements and are working on a few more. We've done some optimizations to speed up new post creation - hopefully this will resolve some of the double posting issues. We've also forced all http[s]://soldierx.com traffic to redirect to https://www.soldierx.com as well as forced all cookies to be www.soldierx.com rather than .soldierx.com. This will help protect against cookie stealing attacks that would utilize servers such as hei. We're working on getting some minor theme updates completed as well as playing around with having a mobile theme for phones and such.
Jerbo Loves Cannabis, and Now You Can Too!
18 September, 2014 - 10:29 — JerboI wrote a guide a while back, and, well, you can read all about it here: https://www.soldierx.com/tutorials/GYOB-Grow-Your-Own-Bud
I'm going to add a couple additions, one with some tidbits on breeding and another on working with seeds and sexing since I left that part out.
HardenedBSD - SoldierX's First BSD Distribution
28 August, 2014 - 19:26 — latteraI've been extremely busy these past few weeks to bring SoldierX a slice of awesomeness. Early on in the ASLR project, SoldierX graciously donated a sparc64 and later a BeagleBone Black. We've been able to identify a few (still outstanding) issues on ARM with our ASLR implementation. Our implementation would not be as stable, robust, or feature-complete today if it weren't for SoldierX's sponsorship and donations. It is with tremendous excitement that today I'm announcing the launch of the HardenedBSD project.
The HardenedBSD project aims to enhance FreeBSD's security by adding many exploit mitigation technologies and upstreaming those enhancements directly to FreeBSD. You can think of HardenedBSD as more of a staging area for bleeding-edge development of exploit mitigation, hardening, and other security-related technologies for FreeBSD. Once ASLR is feature complete and fully upstreamed (including integration with the Ports tree), I'll port certain security features from the Grsecurity Linux kernel hardening patch.
Please keep in mind that we're still in the early stages of getting everything set up. I'm building our first official package repo as we speak (with more than 20,000 packages, it takes a lot of time). Please give it a spin.
