Bugtraq mailing list archives

Re: Buffer overflow prevention


From: Darren Reed <avalon () caligula anu edu au>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 08:13:25 +1000 (Australia/ACT)

Yet, persistantly we have been flooded by PAX supporters demanding
that we should give credit to the PAX people for the ideas in W^X.
When we had NOT known about PAX, and when W^X does NOT technically do
what PAX does.

How is it that out of one side of the mouth PAX people say that things
which I say are not possible on i386 using W^X (full per-page X bit) are
possible using PAX, and then the other side of the mouth says that W^X
is just derived from PAX ideas?
[...]
Oh?  So to get their reward, they send out their drones to assault other
projects, and get credit that is not theirs?
[...]
I urge the PAX authors to get their community's rabid foaming under control.

Damn, this looks like textbook OpenBSD methodology for getting a vendor
to release hardware documentation or otherwise do what OpenBSD wants.

I guess it's a methodology that's only acceptable when it's being done
for the "noble" goals of the OpenBSD project and not when it is being
targetted at OpenBSD itself.

I suppose you might say this is a case of OpenBSD getting back what it
dishes out to others.

I sincerely doubt that this will have any impact, however, on the behaviour
of the OpenBSD drones.  But one can still hope.

Now if I could think of a security-related angle, this email might even
have a chance of ending up being sent to the bugtraq list...

(o)


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