Re: Switch on compiler hardening defaults

[Kees Cook <kees@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 01:36:28PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Kees Cook:
> > I would like to propose enabling[1] the GCC hardening patches that Ubuntu
> > uses[2].
> 
> Seems a good idea to me.  But I think we should defer the required
> full archive rebuild until we've got the hardening patch for operator
> new[] (which currently can return a heap block which is smaller than
> requested).  I've got a preliminary version, but it's got a hole when
> operator new[] is invoked on a variable-length array.  The easy fix
> would probably to outlaw heap allocation of VLAs (it's one of those C
> GCC extensions that leaked into C++, and it's arguably less needed for
> C++).

Right, I agree with this -- I figure this release can be seen as a
transition release, where not everything is compiled that way.  I don't
want to introduce so much archive churn anyway.

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook                                            @debian.org