replace uname -a informational string

[Michael B. Eichorn]

On Fri, 2015-10-23 at 22:54 +0200, O. Hartmann wrote:
> Am Fri, 23 Oct 2015 13:45:25 -0400
> "Michael B. Eichorn" <ike at michaeleichorn.com> schrieb:
> 
> 
> First of all: Thank you very much for your concerns and answers.
> 
> > On Fri, 2015-10-23 at 09:08 +0200, O. Hartmann wrote:
> > > For security purposes, I need to replace the informations given by
> > > "uname -a"
> > > to hode the kernel build system, name et cetera.  
> > 
> > I presume you intendend 'hide' here?
> > 
> > If you want to scrub a binaries of _all_ information about the
> > building
> > system this is a problem Debian is actively working on called
> > 'reproducible builds' but is not possible today.
> > 
> > https://reproducible.debian.net
> > 
> > If you want to hide the hostname, why not just build with a different
> > hostname set?
> 
> Because it is not only the hostname, uname reveals the target host,
> date and OS version.
> 
> In our case, the image ist built on a dedicated host for a security
> appliabce based on
> NanoBSD and I'd like to hide the OS type, the OS name, the build box'
> name and the build
> date. 

I guess the next question is *who* are you hiding this from?

There are probably a few ways to hide from a non-root user. Conversely
hiding from root or a hardware attacker is probably impossible without
modifing the source code.

Also note that including the legally REQUIRED copyright licenses there
will be a sufficient fingerprint to determine that the software is
FreeBSD based.

There may also be consequences for hiding/changing the output of uname.
Some scripts/programs/makefiles may use the output of uname to distiguish
between Linux, BSD, and Solaris.
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