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

Alan Modra via Gdb
2023-04-13T05:16:45Z

On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 12:25:45AM -0400, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
> On 2023-04-12 23:51, Alan Modra wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 12, 2023 at 01:10:01PM -0400, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
> > > OK, then how about this for the first paragraph:
> > >
> > > ~~~
> > > A security bug is one that threatens the security of a system or network.
> > > In the context of GNU Binutils, there are two ways in which a bug could have
> > > security consequences. The primary method is when the tools introduce a
> > > vulnerability in the output file that was not present in the input files
> > > being processed. The other, albeit unlikely way is when a bug in the tools
> > > results in a privilege boundary is crossed in either the tools themselves or
> > > in the code they generate.
> > > ~~~
> >
> > I don't see that talking about privilege boundaries is particularly
> > relevant. Consider this:
> >
> > It is trivially easy to craft an object file that when examined with
> > objdump will read your ssh private keys. That's not a bug, it's a
> > feature of thin archives.
> >
> > Now all you need is some means of delivering those private keys, and
> > I'm sure there are plenty of buffer overflows in libbfd waiting to be
> > exploited, especially with --enable-targets=all.
>
> That's not a crossing of privilege boundaries;

I know. Ah, I see. You were saying that only the very narrow case of
a privilege escalation will be considered a "security bug". Fair
enough I suppose, but that's close to the much simpler and more easily
understood:

"binutils makes no claim to being secure, ergo there are no security
bugs".

--
Alan Modra
Australia Development Lab, IBM