Re: [gentoo-hardened] The state of grsecurity in gentoo

[Marc Schiffbauer <mschiff@gentoo.org>]

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* Matthew Thode schrieb am 03.09.15 um 21:46 Uhr:
> On 09/03/2015 02:28 PM, Marc Schiffbauer wrote:
> > * Anthony G. Basile schrieb am 02.09.15 um 18:13 Uhr:
> >> Hi everyone,
> >>
> >> So by now most people have heard the news that the Grsecurity/PaX team 
> >> are no longer going to be making their stable patches available.  The 
> >> reason is that they are in dispute with a certain embedded systems 
> >> vendor and those negotiations broke down.  So they decided to make their 
> >> stable patches only available to the sponsors. [1]
> >>
> >> What does this mean for Gentoo?  Up until now I have been maintaining 
> >> both the grsec upstream stable and testing patchsets in our 
> >> hardened-sources.  Currently the upstream stable kernels are 3.2.71 and 
> >> 3.14.51 and the testing are 4.1.6.  In about one week, the 3.2.71 and 
> >> 3.14.51 patchsets will no longer be available and I'll continue pushing 
> >> out the 4.1.6.  Unfortunately the testing patchset is precisely as the 
> >> name suggests --- for testing and not production.  For the embedded 
> >> systems company this will be the kiss of death because those patches are 
> >> not suitable for long term.  For Gentoo it will mean that I will have to 
> >> be more vigilant about bugs and trying to stick with a well known kernel 
> >> before moving on.  You can still use these kernels in production, but 
> >> you must be carefull about instabilities as upstream pushes out 
> >> experimental feature that may oops or panic.  Keep older kernel images 
> >> around and revert if it doesn't work.  Look to this list for 
> >> announcements about more serious issues like things that can cause data 
> >> loss.
> >>
> >> I'm hoping that once this company feels the sting of what has just 
> >> happened, they'll come back to the table and talk with Grsec/PaX people.
> >> They won't be able to ship boards with grsec anymore because its not so 
> >> easy to switch out a kernel on a board!  If they ship a board with a 
> >> bug, they loose.  We just reboot :)
> >>
> >> [1] https://grsecurity.net/
> > 
> > Can't Gentoo be a sponsor? I think we could easly croudfund a 
> > sponsorship.
> > 
> > This would help Gentoo and Grsecurty/PaX but OTOH that vendor might just 
> > use the gentoo kernel if they not already did so.
> > 
> > Thoughts?
> > 
> We can't do that because it would make the LTS patches public, which
> spender is trying to avoid.

True and what I wanted to say with the OTOH part. But doesn't this apply 
to any sponsor? I mean we are talking about GPL'ed Software... does the 
GPL permit to distribute source under some kind of NDA?

I fully respect their decision but I hope things will be back to normal 
again soon.

-Marc

> 



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