Re: RFC: Adding a SECURITY.md document to the Binutils

Siddhesh Poyarekar
2023-04-13T16:42:32Z

On 2023-04-13 11:05, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> On 13/04/2023 16:02, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
>> On 2023-04-13 10:50, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
>>> No, whilst elf can be executed, objdump should never be doing that:
>>> it's a tool for examining a file, not running it.  You have to have a
>>> tool that can safely examine the contents of an elf file or you can
>>> never verify it for issues - opening it up in emacs to examine the
>>> contents is not the way to do that :)
>>
>> You can verify it for issues, in a sandbox.
>
> Maybe.  But not always, it might not crash the program, but still lead
> to issues once taken outside of the sandbox.

You don't analyze untrusted data outside of a sandbox. Really, it's
security 101.

>>> But all that is beside the point.  The original case I gave was a
>>> /corrupt/ elf file that caused a buffer overrun in the objdump binary.
>>
>> ... and that's a robustness issue.  Any buffer overrun in any program
>> could in theory be exploited to send out files.
>>
>
> So what's your point?  These /are/ vulnerabilities in the program and
> need to be considered security issues.

I already made my point; I agree that they are security issues but the
security mitigation mechanism is in the environment, not the program. I
do not think it is in the interest of the binutils project to guarantee
safety in analysis of untrusted programs without requisite protections
of the environment.

Sid