Research: effects of diversity on threads from malware

[Knijff, S.A.W. van der]

I'm performing an research about the effects of diversity
on malware. In this research there will be looked at the
effects of diversity within an operating system on malware,
in this case different GNU/Linux distro's.
Cause of the limited time schedule there will only be
tested with three distro's, after this there will be picked
one distro which is tested on different architectures.
There is chosen to work with Fedora Core 6, OpenSuse 10.2
and Ubuntu 6.10.
Before starting the real-life tests there is a need to make
some assumptions on what will happen when the malware is
run on a system. Here for there will be looked at the
compiler flags that are used during compilation of the
distribution, I'm namely interested in the compiler flags
which enhance the security within the distro.
Also are there any kind of security measurements besides
the compiler flags, for example SELinux, AppArmor, Address
Randomization Execshield, PIE or others?
I hope that you can provide me with some answers on my
questions so i can move on with the research.

Stephan