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Date:      Fri, 26 Aug 2016 09:08:01 -0600
From:      Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
To:        Pedro Giffuni <pfg@freebsd.org>
Cc:        Ed Maste <emaste@freebsd.org>,  "freebsd-toolchain@FreeBSD.org" <freebsd-toolchain@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Time to enable partial relro
Message-ID:  <CANCZdfpQbAe8pnxZuCab0JoW5ByGbVbKtEJjrBmL=-kMdg_PnA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <6af6f640-a00a-1359-d40f-c62b40eafb9c@FreeBSD.org>
References:  <b75890eb-d8bd-759e-002f-ab0c16db0975@FreeBSD.org> <CANCZdfqAmhN1owbo_rDt5xjC%2BbboOHrgu2xDHeZi1P02rX7EwQ@mail.gmail.com> <CAPyFy2B3j7h9Cme=8VPs4ogOMgYAWvbyggZ3NMJraz5xoWqiXg@mail.gmail.com> <CANCZdfp9Roc=MyrD8UO-efKOn5vSsOprM9juw6NeYT2T0Ag0wg@mail.gmail.com> <6af6f640-a00a-1359-d40f-c62b40eafb9c@FreeBSD.org>

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On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 9:06 AM, Pedro Giffuni <pfg@freebsd.org> wrote:
>
>
> On 08/26/16 10:01, Warner Losh wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 8:36 AM, Ed Maste <emaste@freebsd.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 26 August 2016 at 10:18, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> So what's the summary of why we'd want to do that? What benefit does it
>>>> bring?
>>>> Sure, other folks do it, but why?
>>>
>>>
>>> It's a relatively low cost technique to mitigate certain
>>> vulnerabilities. rtld needs to write to some sections during load but
>>> they don't need to be writeable after starting the program. relro
>>> reorders the output sections so that they are grouped together, and
>>> rtld remaps them read-only on start. This is often called "partial
>>> relro." I don't know of any real downside to enabling it, other than
>>> it could possibly break some strangely built third party software.
>>> It's been enabled on other platforms for quite some time though and I
>>> doubt we'd run into new issues.
>>>
>>> It doesn't bring a huge benefit by itself though; the PLT is still
>>> writeable. Adding "-z now" to the linker invocation produces "full
>>> relro" which makes the PLT read-only too. It has a negative impact on
>>> process start-up time though.
>>
>>
>> Sounds like this has implications for all the RTLD on all our
>> architectures. Has this been tested across all of them?
>>
>
> It affects anything ELF yes, but AFAICT the change is platform independent.

That's a different answer than 'it's been tested on all platforms and
it's fine.'

Warner



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