Removable media security in FreeBSD

[David Schultz]

On Sun, Jun 08, 2003, Robert Watson wrote:
> On the "SECURE" front -- well, it depends a bit on how robust our file
> system support is.  Bad UFS file systems can cause the FreeBSD kernel to
> behave improperly, since it's assumed that file systems will be clean or
> explicitly checked before mounting.  I've never really experimented much
> with our FAT file system support to see how robust it is; we have a
> 5.2-RELEASE TODO list item to merge some robustness improvements from the
> Darwin implementation back into FreeBSD, which suggests our implementation
> could be improved on :-).

FAT is somewhat less robust than UFS.  In particular, its handling
of media errors can lead to a tight loop in at least one place and
a null pointer dereference in another.  Improvements from Darwin
would be much appreciated.  I would be interested in knowing the
licensing issues involved, if any.