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Date:      Sun, 17 Dec 2000 02:43:21 
From:      "Some Person" <ntvsunix@hotmail.com>
To:        roman@xpert.com, kris@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Security Update Tool..
Message-ID:  <F246vUPfYUimAxP9ZoL00001a62@hotmail.com>

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Right on! That's excellent to hear..

sacheck, well, that was just a hypothetical name I gave it. ;)

So far, I can't think of much more than what you've mentioned, but I'm sure 
later on I will think of things especially once it's implemented and I can 
test it out... I'll be sure to keep your email addy handy.

>
>On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Kris Kennaway wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 12:16:29AM +0000, Some Person wrote:
> >
> > > My question is, is there a util yet that in theory (maybe if so, or if
> > > someone writes one would work differently than what I'm imagining) 
>queries a
> > > central database with all the security advisories, checks the local 
>system
> > > for comparisons and vulnerabilities against that database and reports 
>to the
> > > user who ran the util.
> >
> > Not at present - I was talking to someone a few months ago about doing
> > exactly this: the existing security advisories we publish contain all
> > of the information you need to implement such a thing (at least for
> > ports), although we'd probably need to structure them more rigidly so
> > they can be machine-parsed. However nothing concrete has materialised
> > yet, so there's still plenty of room for interested contributors to
> > step up and help :-)
> >
> > Note that identification of vulnerabilities is different from
> > automated correction of vulnerabilities - in order to do that it needs
> > some fairly complicated infrastructure in the ports system to upgrade
> > ports/packages and handle dependencies etc. Not that I want to
> > dissuade anyone from working on this very worthy project :-)
> >
> > Kris
>
>I'm the person Kris was talking about. I'm working on it, have little
>time, and switched to gnupg lately, but it'll be done eventually.
>Perhaps this thread will make me finish it earlier.
>I'd like to hear ideas which I will incorporate in it.
>Meanwhile the main idea is:
>1) have a local directory for advisories
>2) upon start, contact freebsd.org and check for newer advisories
>3) check advisories with gnupg (security officer's pgp key has to be
>installed manually).
>4) extract the valuable information from the advisory
>5) check against /var/db/pkg/* (revisions, and before it was invented -
>dates, yes, I know it's weak, but I've nothing to with it).
>6) depending on running mode, complain or upgrade (pkg_delete; pkg_install
>-r)
>7) anything else?
>Written in perl and will be called pkg_security.
>I guess it could be changed to sacheck if all binaries have the id in
>them, so using what(1) will reveal the cvs revision.
>
>Looking forward for your comments,
>
>--Roman Shterenzon, UNIX System Administrator and Consultant
>[ Xpert UNIX Systems Ltd., Herzlia, Israel. Tel: +972-9-9522361 ]
>

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