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Weak

Posted Jun 2, 2005 8:35 UTC (Thu) by goaty (guest, #17783)
Parent article: The Integrity Measurement Architecture

It'll protect (to some extent) ordinary users from their own stupidity. Not much use if root themselves is trying to subvert it.

1) Write your "black hat script"
2) gdb /bin/sh
3) break send_hash_to_kernel
4) run sh black-hat-script.sh
5) set hash_value = permitted_value
6) continue

The trusted computing folk can get around this by prohibiting gdb... anyone reminded of http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html ?

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Weak

Posted Jun 2, 2005 20:57 UTC (Thu) by zakaelri (guest, #17928) [Link]

The trusted computing folk can get around this by prohibiting gdb

Presumably, the trusted computing folks would not have gdb installed on a secure machine--gdb is inheirently insecurable from their perspective. The entire suite of dev tools is usually the first thing removed from a secure system.

Also, you could use strip to remove the symbols from your binaries. That would make it nigh impossible to find anything with gdb.

Weak

Posted Nov 17, 2005 9:48 UTC (Thu) by pkolloch (subscriber, #21709) [Link]

> Also, you could use strip to remove the symbols from your binaries. That would make it nigh impossible to find anything with gdb.

Well, only statically linked stuff, or? Any symbol references to dynamically linked libraries remain clearly visible. Ok, ok, from a strict security point of view, dynamic linking has its own large set of issues.