Re: Linux Kernel Audit Project?

[John Richard Moser]

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Alan Cox wrote:
> On Llu, 2005-01-17 at 07:40, John Richard Moser wrote:
> 
>>On the same line, I've been graphing Ubuntu Linux Security Notices for a
>>while.  I've noticed that in the last 5, the number of kernel-related
>>vulnerabilities has doubled (3 more).  This disturbs me.
> 
> 
> I've been monitoring the kernel security stuff for a long time too.
> There are several obvious trends and I think most are positive
> 
> - Tools like coverity and sparse are significantly increasing the number
> of flaws found. In particular they are turning up long time flaws in
> code, but they also mean new flaws of that type are being found. People
> aren't really turning these tools onto user space - yet -
> 

These are great, but I don't think such tools could cover all issues,
especially in the kernel (where hardware is a factor).  Perhaps by
hammering a function with every input possible, but eh.

Humans create the tools, humans create the flaws.  Thus, humans create
flaws in the tools.  Humans of course aren't staticly flawed (as the
tools will be), so they or other humans can notice bugs they missed before.

> - We get bursts of holes of a given type. If you plot things like
> "buffer overflow" "structure passed to user space not cleaned" "maths
> overflow check error" against time you'll see they show definite
> patterns with spikes decaying at different rates towards zero.
> 

\o/

> There are also people other than Linus who read every single changeset.
> I do for one.
> 

"Read" and "Audit" are two different things.  I can read a changeset and
see that a[10] got a 20 character string into it; I will NOT see that a
particular execution path 17 function calls long under one obscure but
possible and deliberately activatable condition causes memory corruption.

I thought the purpose of an audit was to sit down and give the code
several long, hard looks from different perspectives; though I've never
done one (I hope to in the future), so I wouldn't know would I?

Maybe I should stop talking before I make myself look stupider...

> Alan

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