OpenBSD Recent Security Innovations

Re:OpenBSD Recent Security Innovations by wahern on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @08:04PM (#20110302)

Pretty sure they've deliberately kept it out on principle: better to encrypt swap, ensure permissions on core files are strict, etc, rather than hope all applications correctly set MAP_NOCORE on every bit of sensitive data. Sounds like it just became too inconvenient to avoid, though.

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Re:OpenBSD Recent Security Innovations by Someone on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @08:58PM (#20110597)

”better to encrypt swap, ensure permissions on core files are strict”

I don’t think that’s entirely true. A risk this mitigates against is that system administrators read a user’s most sensitive data when they help them debug a crash.

Encrypting the disk won’t protect against that.

Making the core dump owned by the user running the executable won’t, either, because a) the user will have to make the file readable by the system administrators to get help fixing the crash problem, and b) one can assume the system administrators have root privileges, anyways.

On the other hand, a) programs can’t know what a user’s most sensitive data is (for example, they might be writing in their diary), and b) why would users trust a program to protect their most sensitive data in that way, given that it doesn’t even manage to “not crash“?

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Re:OpenBSD Recent Security Innovations by tedunangst on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @08:57PM (#20110589)

Deliberate makes it sound like we wanted secrets to appear in the core files. I don't think that's the case, but otherwise yes, there's been a certain amount of care to making core files secure.

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Re:OpenBSD Recent Security Innovations by throwaway2048 on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @11:16PM (#20111266)

Why even bother with core files if you aren't a developer? they are completely useless for an average user and are really nothing but a risk.

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Re:OpenBSD Recent Security Innovations by asveikau on Thursday June 06, 2019 @12:42AM (#20111651)

I feel like this kind of culture may be dying in most places. But it used to be a common thing that you could pass a core file around to someone knowledgeable who knew what to do with it. In a workplace or university, maybe someone on staff who is technical. In a piece of software, either open source or commercial, maybe its developer. Obviously there is trust implicit in that, because core files contain your data.

On Windows, their equivalent of core files gets sent to Microsoft and they run analysis on them to get most common stack traces for crashing bugs. If you're opted in.

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Re:OpenBSD Recent Security Innovations by bluGill on Thursday June 06, 2019 @10:26AM (#20114842)

Why doesn't the system automatically pass core files to someone who knows how to deal with them. I work on an embedded system and our system to get core files back from the users has meant a lot of crashes go from "no idea what happened, closed" to "found the bug and fixed it".

Of course there are security implications. Developers are not allowed to see core files from real customers unless the customer agrees. However our test department and our beta tests agree to this. I don't think anyone has ever looked into a core file to see sensitive data not related to the crash but the possibility exists.

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Re:OpenBSD Recent Security Innovations by SmellyGeekBoy on Thursday June 06, 2019 @05:39AM (#20112944)

To be fair, I'm not sure OpenBSD is targeted at the "average user".

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