Re: Secure Linux From Scratch

ashes <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.lfs.security
Organization Utopia Inc
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I have been actively developing a hardened Linux from Scratch for about a 
month or two. I have propolice, gcc-3.4's -pie backport, which takes advatage 
of the Pax kernel patch for randomized memory address space, and the entire 
LFS system builds with both protections with the exception of the kernel 
itself, and grub. Adding a read only encrypted filesystem would be trivial. 
Building a trusted system takes a trusted host system. In my opinion it would 
take two simutainious LFS builds to construct a trusted system (trusted by 
us). If there is enough interest in designing a Secure LFS book count me in. 
We will need some sort of website and maybe a seperate mailing list. More 
importantly we need a security policy for the design. What I consider 
important to security maybe isn't what others think. I have also been doing 
some light auditing, the grades depend on version of the software. For 
example coreutils-5.0.91 software was less submissive to attack then 
coreutils-5.0 (using bfbtester). I am not too impressed with selinux, it's 
policies are not manditory; the attacker just needs to exploit a protocol not 
recognised by selinux, such as ipv6 (who knows what else).
I would also like to note there are countless "secure" linux implementations, 
and if we are to start a new one it better be good or its not worth doing. In 
most, if not all, distributions, security is sacrificed for marketing and 
user friendlyness. I dont mean this as a rant, but more as the truth, systems 
like debain, gentoo, redhat, and even openbsd, care more about the money in 
their pocket then the quality of the system they ship. I hope this is where 
LFS is different since its not marketed for the masses.
Security starts with the toolchain, and no software is exempt from audit.

Sorry for the late follow up.

-- 
cendres at videotron dot ca
gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 0xD4E26E10

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