From owner-freebsd-security Sat Dec 1 9:16:51 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-security@freebsd.org Received: from smtp.noos.fr (claudel.noos.net [212.198.2.83]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EB39537B405 for ; Sat, 1 Dec 2001 09:16:45 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 34585184 invoked by uid 0); 1 Dec 2001 16:53:31 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO noos.fr) ([195.132.176.225]) (envelope-sender ) by 212.198.2.83 (qmail-ldap-1.03) with SMTP for ; 1 Dec 2001 16:53:31 -0000 Message-ID: <3C0903C1.9010108@noos.fr> Date: Sat, 01 Dec 2001 17:22:25 +0100 From: Extended Laurent Fabre User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr-FR; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011019 Netscape6/6.2 X-Accept-Language: fr-fr MIME-Version: 1.0 Cc: security@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: philosophical question... References: <200112011642.JAA09819@lariat.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Seems like an OpenBSD feature :P But from a security point of view, if an attacker can guess the random seed, i can't see the protection offered... It will just raise the number of brute force attacks... No ? Brett Glass wrote: >>Would it inconvenience debugging that malloc(3) becomes non >>deterministic in its layout ? >> > >>Would the increased uncertainty on program run-time be >>good or bad ? >> > > It could make reproduction of problems more difficult. So, if > it goes in, I'd like a switch to turn it off.... Maybe a > sysctl. > > But there's a more serious philosophical issue here. Isn't > shuffling the heap to avoid attacks really a form of > "security via obscurity?" > > --Brett Glass > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message