FreeBSD Transient Memory problem?

[John-Mark Gurney]

My Email wrote this message on Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 07:49 -1000:
> My apologies, I have been replying too all, I hope that is the correct method.
> 
> Anyway, that is very interesting information. I'd be extremely interested in information on customizing malloc and jemalloc. Let me know where to start. Thanks!

For jemalloc, look at man malloc: opt.junk

for kernel malloc, look at sys/kern_malloc.c..  It doesn't look like
there is a knob to turn on kernel malloc filling, but it wouldn't be
hard...

Though the performance impact of junk filling is very significant...

> On Sep 11, 2013, at 7:35 PM, John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:
> 
> > Jonathon Wright wrote this message on Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 14:15 -1000:
> >> I have posted this question (username-scryptkiddy) in the forums:
> >> http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=41875
> >> but was suggested to bring it here to the mailing list for discussion.
> >> 
> >> Basically, FreeBSD 8.3 (64bit) is what we use in our shop. We were
> >> inspected by a security team and they had issues with FreeBSD's memory
> >> management.
> >> 
> >> Namely the transient memory and object reuse areas of FreeBSD. They claimed
> >> that FreeBSD did not have a Common Criteria (EAL1-4) evaluation completed,
> >> and therefore was vulnerable to the Transient memory problem.
> > 
> > Any system that uses malloc will have difficulties with this as most
> > versions of free will not zero out the memory...  You could make
> > modifications to kernel malloc to always zero memory on free, and turn on
> > the junk feature of jemalloc and that could possibly close this issue
> > for them...
> > 
> >> Our higher ups need some sort of documentation / testing  that can be used
> >> to counter this, since changing Operating Systems is not something we have
> >> time / manpower to do, but might have too based on this supposed 'finding'.
> >> 
> >> The post has all the details. Let me know I need to repost in this as well.
> > 
> > I know that FreeBSD 4.7 and 4.9 has been EAL3 ceritfied.  I worked for
> > nCircle a number of years ago, and they got their products EAL3
> > cerified.
> > 
> > Link:
> > http://www.commoncriteriaportal.org:80/files/epfiles/nCircle%20CR%20v1.0.pdf
> > 
> > It is possible someone else has received certification on a newer version,
> > but I'm not aware of any at this time...

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."