[arch-general] End of official PaX and grsecurity support in Arch Linux

[Alexander Harrigan]

It would be great if you can provide linux-hardened kernel with everything
what KSPP has enabled by default. Even in AUR so you won't have to rebuild it
constantly and random stack option would have more sense.

Two questions:

1\. Do you think maintaining 4.9 lts grsec kernel would be doable until it
gets EOL from upstream? Are there many incompatible changes with minor kernel
releases? I heard gentoo (maybe debian?) are considering this.

2\. Why hidepid was removed? I saw "lack of time" comment but...there wasn't
much to maintain as it worked flawles for long time.

Thank you for your great effort in maintaining grsec for all that years. I'm
looking forward to being your customer (Copperhead) when it will be avalaible
overseas :)

On On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 08:17 PM, Daniel Micay via arch-general <arch-
general at archlinux.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2017-04-27 at 19:12 +0000, Carsten Mattner wrote:

> > Is CopperheadOS using grsec or something derived from it?

>

> It starts from the baseline provided by Google and ports features from

> PaX and grsecurity as needed to the kernels. It used to use a full PaX

> port on ARM devices but that hasn't made sense for quite some time.

>

> Android is much a different target. CopperheadOS is starting from a base

> system that's already quite hardened. PaX / grsecurity kernel self

> protection features are applicable to Android but the bulk of them don't

> support arm64 in grsecurity at the moment so it's no use beyond as a

> source for porting / inspiration. The features that landed upstream

> ended up being ported to arm64. The grsecurity test patches becoming

> private has no impact on CopperheadOS. There's a significant indirect

> impact in that the source of 95% of Linux kernel security research /

> innovations is now no longer publicly available. KSPP no longer has an

> incredible source to copy ideas and code from and neither do we.

>

> grsecurity RBAC and all but a few of the miscellaneous features aren't

> relevant to Android. It already has the baseline per-user, per-app

> uid/gid separation reinforced with a full system SELinux policy that's

> far beyond what RHEL / Fedora provide, since there's a well-defined base

> system (no system administrator choosing packages / configuration) and a

> well-defined app sandbox for all third party code. Devices handle their

> drivers and hardware-specific services/libraries via device-specific

> policy extensions. For example, SELinux ioctl filtering is used for

> kernel attack surface reduction by whitelisting ioctl commands per-

> device including whitelisting only the set of GPU driver ioctl commands

> used by the device in practice. They're also making increasingly good

> use of seccomp-bpf.

>

> Even some of the most basic security features like full verified boot

> for the whole OS and always enabled encryption are pipe dreams for

> traditional distributions. Android's linker doesn't support non-PIE and

> text relocations are only supported for legacy API level 32-bit apps.

> Full RELRO, strong SSP and _FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 (beyond what glibc

> provides) are globally enabled.

>

> The AOSP kernels are very minimal, i.e. no modules enabled and only a

> small set of drivers, etc. needed for the platform. Features like System

> V IPC and now AIO aren't enabled. Google already has KSPP features

> backported and enabled in their LTS kernels like HARDENED_USERCOPY

> (incomplete KSPP implementation of PaX USERCOPY), __ro_after_init

> (incomplete KSPP implementation of PaX __read_only) and PAN (UDEREF

> equivalent) emulation for ARM and ARMv8.0 where PAN isn't yet available.

> They also have kernel security features that were rejected upstream like

> perf_event_paranoid=3 which we upstreamed to AOSP.

>

> In addition to that much different starting point, CopperheadOS also has

> full control of the entire base system. There's a unified build system

> and all of the sources are in one tree like a *BSD OS. It's so much

> different than trying to deal with bringing desktop Linux security on

> par with 2008 security standards, which is still so far away as a goal.

> One day perhaps flatpak / wayland will have caught up to providing a

> basic security model for desktop Linux and some day Arch will finally

> get PIE enabled by default but all of those kind of things are already

> provided by the baseline OS that CopperheadOS starts from.

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