Message-ID: <41EBFEB5.5080807@comcast.net>
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 13:06:45 -0500
From: John Richard Moser <nigelenki@comcast.net>
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To: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
CC: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Linux Kernel Audit Project?
References: <41EB6691.10905@comcast.net> <20050117073217.GC13827@redhat.com> <41EB6D94.9040500@comcast.net> <20050117123813.GO4274@stusta.de>
In-Reply-To: <20050117123813.GO4274@stusta.de>
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Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 02:47:32AM -0500, John Richard Moser wrote:
> 

[...]

> 
> What exactly do you want to audit for?
> 

Security holes

> If it's only for "ordinary" bugs, that's simply not feasible.
> The amount of patches going into 2.6 is currently at about 3 MB every 
> week. You can hardly keep up with all of that - and even if you were 
> able to do so, some theoretically correct patch might break in practice 
> due to hardware bugs or bugs in some toolchain.
> 

Understood.

> Regarding security audits:
> They aren't a bad idea, and not bound to new patches - much legacy code 
> in the kernel has for sure more bugs than new code. The linus-kernel way 
> for such a project is not to scream "We need SOMETHING" - the 
> linux-kernel way is that you start with the work to get the ball rolling 
> (and if other people are interested to work in the same area, give them 
> some guidance).
> 

I'm nowhere near being able to actually do a security audit.  I
understand what an audit is, I understand what causes vulnerabilities,
but I'd probably only be able to see the most obvious things (like
strcpy(a,"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa") into a[4]).

If I had a few more years of experience, college out of the way, a good
job, and had some of my other projects moving along, maybe. . . .

> cu
> Adrian
> 

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