Improving security

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

I just read this interesting article on lwn:
http://lwn.net/Articles/106214/
(lwn subscriber only)

This talks about things like:
1 Stack Smash Protection
2 PAX (alternative Exec Shield)
3 Position Independent Executables.

Stack Smash Protection sounds like a cool feature to me. I don't know 
what the performance impact is, but as a developer even if it is to slow 
to use by default I would love to have it intergrated into the gcc 
shipped by Fedora to make debugging easier.

PAX uses tricks to get a non executable stack, and assignes random 
addresses to PIE executables, which Fedora already has in the form of
Exec Shield, good! But if I undertand it correctly PAX does more for 
example also make data pages non executable, this might be something 
worth looking into.

PIE we already have, good!

Regards,

Hans