Unfortunate dynamic linking for everything

[E.B. Dreger]

SL> Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 17:06:06 -0700 (MST)
SL> From: Scott Long

SL> 3.  Binary security updates: there is a lot of interest in providing a
SL>     binary update mechanism for doing security updates.  Having a dynamic
SL>     root means that vulnerable libraries can be updated without having to
SL>     update all of the static binaries that might use them.

Although this doesn't help the upgrade process, what if one
symbol (such as function name + CVS tag) were exported per
function?  One could check for a vulnerability by strings | grep
funcname | inspect CVS tag.  A more elegant approach would be to
store such versioning in another segment and have a tool that
understands the data, a la debugger symbols.

On a different note:

+ Some of us have had a few bad experiences with glibc (granted,
  it's glibc) upgrades when the shell, cp, ls, et cetera are
  dynamically linked.

+ I put the shell of choice and all of SSH's guts on the root
  partition... if /usr gets clobbered, I still want to be able
  to boot and log in remotely.  If / gets clobbered, I have
  bigger problems. :-)


Eddy
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