FreeBSD Transient Memory problem?

[Jonathon Wright]

I'm looking into it now, I'm sure I'll have more questions, thanks for the
starting point though!


On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 8:32 AM, John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:

> 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."
>