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Mitigating risks, part 2 - service isolation

Internet: absolute communication, absolute isolation
\~Paul Carvel

The quote might be ripped out of its context completely, since it wasn't made when talking about risks and the assurance you might need to get in order to reduce risks. But it does give a nice introduction to the second part of …

Mitigating risks, part 1

We are running Foobar 2.0 on Tomcat 4. We know that Tomcat 4 isn't supported, but hey - our (internal) customer is happy that the Foobar application works and would like to keep it that way. Upgrading to Tomcat 5 or higher is not possible - Foobar 2.0 only works …

checksec kernel security

I have blogged about checksec.sh earlier before. Jono, one of the #gentoo-hardened IRC-members, kindly pointed me to its --kernel option. So I feel obliged to give its options a stab as well. So, here goes the next batch of OPE-style (One Paragraph Explanations).

~# checksec.sh --kernel
* Kernel protection information …

High level explanation on some binary executable security

One very important functionality offered by Gentoo Hardened is a specific toolchain (compiler, libraries and more) that contains patches to make the built binaries a bit more protected from certain vulnerabilities. Explaining all those in detail is too much for a simple blog post like this, but some time ago …

cvechecker 3.0

I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of cvechecker 3.0. It contains two major feature enhancements: watchlists and MySQL support.

watchlists allow cvechecker to track and report on CVEs for software that cvechecker didn't detect on the system (or perhaps even isn't installed on the system). You can use …

cvechecker updates

The in-svn version of cvechecker has seen quite a few changes in the last few days. I'm adding support for MySQL to it. This support will be added in three steps:

1. support the same features as cvechecker currently does using sqlite
2. streamline the database code so that duplicate code in …

cvechecker update

A while ago, I got the request to enhance cvechecker with support for providing a list of installed software (or software you want to watch over with cvechecker) even if cvechecker isn't able to detect that software on your system. I've implemented this and it is currently available in the …

cvechecker 2.0 released

Okay, enough play - time for a new release. Since cvechecker 1.0 was released, a few important changes have been made to the cvechecker tools:

• You can now tell cvechecker to only check newly added files, or remove a set of files from its internal database. Previously, you had to …

Helping with version detection rules in cvechecker

The new development snapshot, available from the cvechecker project site, contains a helper script that returns potential version detection rules for your system if the current cvechecker database doesn't detect your software. The script is currently available for Gentoo (called cverules_gentoo) but other distributions can be easily added. The …

Delta processing in cvechecker

The cvechecker application will support delta file processing as well as higher version matching with its next release. The functionality is currently in version control and I still have to work out quite a few things before they can go live, but the functionality is there.

Now why would these …