Re: Crypto consolidation in debian ?

[Andreas Metzler <ametzler@downhill.at.eu.org>]

Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> wrote:
[...]
> It appears to be usable by a lot of projects and people, so that seems
> like an exaggeration.  If I have understood Werner correctly, he
> believes that it is the setuid binaries that are broken and should be
> fixed.
[...]

Hello,
I would rather say he considers NSS (or PAM) fundamentally broken,
because a tiny, scrutinized SUID binary ends up with *huge* amounts of
external unrelated code in its address space after getpwnam().

Also libgcrypt does seem to be designed to be used indirectly (via
gnutls) without knowing and caring about it. (Threading, secmem).
Which is why about 50% of all gnutls-using packages are using
gcry_control.

cu andreas

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