20 lines
1.1 KiB
Plaintext
20 lines
1.1 KiB
Plaintext
When I started the Adamantix project, one of the first things I did
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was to add PaX functionality to the kernel. PaX is a process memory
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protection patch. Anything that happens outside the kernel on a
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UNIX system happens inside a process. There are many attacks on the
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Internet that try to corrupt the process memory, in order to make
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it do something for which it was not intended. One example of such
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an attack is the so called buffer overflow attack. This kind of
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attack is one of the most popular at this moment.
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PaX protects against such attacks. Or so the author claims. When I
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started to add PaX to Adamantix, almost nothing happened. A few
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libraries broke, but that was easy to fix, and that was it. I
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expected many programs to break. So I started to wonder: ``Does
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this patch really do anything?'' Instead of speculating, I decided
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to write a test suite. After some time, the first version of paxtest
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was ready. More functionality was added. With the addition of every
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test, it proved that PaX was working just fine. I decided to publish
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paxtest, because it can be useful for other people to test the
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functionality of the memory protection of their system(s).
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