We at HardenedBSD have added support in 11-CURRENT for compiling nearly all of base as Position-Independent Executables (PIEs, for short). This work bumps hardening.version to 45. We've enabled PIE base for amd64 and i386 and hope to enable it for arm64 before or during BSDCan 2016. Compiling an application as a PIE enables it to take full advantage of ASLR. Without PIE support, the application itself is loaded at a fixed address, determined at compile time. As of this writing, only nine applications are not compiled as PIEs. At least two of them must stay that way (/sbin/init and /sbin/init.bak), so that leaves the outstanding list at seven. This is a huge leap forward for HardenedBSD. We have tested PIE base on several amd64 systems, both virtualized and bare metal. We have done multiple amd64 package builds with success. We would like to thank Bryan Drewery for his help.

An hbsd-update(8) update archive has been published for 11-CURRENT/amd64 with the "PIEified" base. Update at your leisure.

PIE base is enabled by default for amd64 and i386. We hope to enable it for ARM64 before or during BSDCan. Speaking of ARM64, we will be bringing ten Raspberry Pi 3 devices (which are ARM64) with us to BSDCan, eight of which will be given out to lucky individuals. We want the BSD community to hack on them and get ARM64/Aarch64 fully functional on them.

UPDATE 18 Apr 2016 05:03:00 EDT: PIEified base support has been enabled for ARM64.