Not that long ago we had our monthly Gentoo Hardened project meeting (on October 3rd to be exact). On these meetings, we discuss the progress of the project since the last meeting.

For our toolchain domain, Zorry reported that the PIE patchset is updated for GCC, fixing bug #436924. Blueness also mentioned that he will most likely create a separate subproject for the alternative hardened systems (such as mips and arm). This is mostly for management reasons (as the information is currently scattered throughout the Gentoo project at large).

For the kernel domain, since version 3.5.4-r2 (and higher), the kernexec and uderef settings (for grSecurity) should no longer impact performance on virtualized platforms (when hardware acceleration is used of course), something that has been bothering Intel-based systems for quite some time already. Also, the problem with guest systems immediately reserving (committing) all memory on the host should be fixed with recent kernels as well. Of course, this is only true as long as you don't sanitize your memory, otherwise all memory gets allocated regardless.

In the SELinux subproject, we now have live ebuilds allowing users to pull in the latest policy changes directly from the git repository where we keep our policy at. Also, we will see a high commit frequency in the next few weeks (or perhaps even months) as Fedora's changes are being merged with upstream. Another change is that our patchbundles no longer contain all individual patches, but a merged patch. This increases the deployment time of a SELinux policy package considerably (up to 30% faster since patching is now only a second or less). And finally, the latest userspace utilities are in the hardened-dev overlay ready for broader testing.

grSecurity is still focusing on the XATTR-based PaX flags. The eclass (pax-utils) has been updated, and we will now be looking at supporting the PaX extended attributes for file systems such as tmpfs.

For profiles, people will notice that in the next few weeks, we will be dropping the (extremely) old SELinux profiles as the current ones have been marked stable long time ago.

In the system integrity domain, IMA is being worked on (packages and documentation) after which we'll move to the EVM support to protect extended attributes.

And finally, klondike held a good talk about Gentoo Hardened at the Flossk conference in Kosovo.

All in all a good month of work, again with many thanks to the volunteers that are keeping Gentoo Hardened alive and kicking!