RE: [RFC] Adding a SECURITY policy for GDB

["Willgerodt, Felix" <felix.willgerodt@intel.com>]

> >   While GDB is intended to be robust against untrusted binaries, it is
> >   not responsible for arbitrary code execution on a system.  As a
> >   result, any bugs exposed by untrusted binaries will be accepted and
> >   treated with appropriate urgency, but will not be considered
> >   security issues.  This applies to local as well as remote debugging;
> >   any bugs in gdbserver, exposed by untrusted binaries will be
> >   accepted and treated with appropriate urgency, but will not be
> >   considered security issues.
> 
> My opinion would have been that just loading a file in GDB just to
> inspect it statically should be a safe thing to do, even with a
> malicious binary.  It's possible to do in theory, by being defensive and
> very careful of everything we read.
> 
> In practice, I understand that it might not be a realistic goal, given
> the complexity and the current state of BFD / GDB.  And since most of
> the CVEs you got (IIUC) were of this kind, that wouldn't help you much.
> So, I'm fine with that you have, given that I'm not the one who has to
> deal with these annoyances.
> 
> Simon

First off thanks for doing this Andrew! I am very much in favor of your
proposed SECURITY file.

Can the file explicitly mention the static inspection case that Simon
brought up?
To me, it is pretty clear that untrusted binaries that you run in GDB are
out of scope, as you already actively chose to run untrusted code.
However I think the static case is much less clear for many people.
Being more explicit about it could help with that.

FYI, the binutils file has written this:

"Bugs in inspection tools (eg readelf, nm objdump) will not be considered
to be security bugs, since they do not create executable output
files."
(I personally think their reasoning is a bit vague, but that is another topic.)

Felix
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