HardenedBSD June 2020 Status Report

Now that HardenedBSD's infrastructure has found its new home, it's time to ramp up development again. We're working out kinks with regards to bandwidth and hope to increase bandwidth to our infrastructure on the inside of two months.

I've started working on adding filesystem extended attributes support to tmpfs. Once support is added, we should be able to integrate with ports/packages such that our users will no longer need to worry about toggling exploit mitigations--they'll already come pre-toggled for misbehaving applications.

I suspect this work will take a few months to complete. I've never done filesystem development, so I'm treading new waters. Once filesystem extended attribute support is added, I plan to integrate exploit mitigation toggling in the ports tree.

When all is said and done, I'm thinking around six months time frame. Granted, I have health issues, so there's no guarantees. I'll keep everyone updated.

My next goal will be integration of SafeStack into the RTLD. This is needed in order to apply SafeStack to both shared libraries and applications. This integration work relates directly with Cross-DSO CFI support, since Cross-DSO CFI requires the same/similar types of integrations.

I'm interviewing a few people to add to the HardenedBSD Board of Directors. We've added Jordan Boland to the team. He will help maintain the infrastructure. I plan to get with him once the bandwidth issues have been resolved.

I've included an intro to Jordan below. We will have more exciting news to share soon with regards to the Board of Directors.

==== BEGIN INTRO TO JORDAN BOLAND ====
I'm very excited to be getting more involved with HardenedBSD and to have an opportunity to serve on the Board.

I'm a lifelong tinkerer and open-source enthusiast. I was introduced to Linux in middle school and was fascinated with it until I was introduced to FreeBSD while in college. I ran FreeBSD on my personal machines for almost a decade until I was introduced to HardenedBSD, which quickly took over as my OS of choice.

My degree includes a specialization in network administration, and although I love that field I've worked in too many small IT shops to avoid becoming a generalist, and these days I do nothing related to it in my professional life. I've worked in higher education,
healthcare, telecommunications, and (to the complete surprise of my 17-year-old self) have somehow arrived at Microsoft, where I am a support engineer in the research division.

I'm not a programmer, I'm a person who occasionally has a problem that requires writing some code. On that journey I've dabbled in C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Perl, Powershell, and BASH/Bourne Shell (extensively). I really admire those that can write kernel code
and have such a deep understanding of the hardware and what is happening "under the hood", and I'd love to have that kind of proficiency someday. In the meantime, my best contribution to this project will likely be infrastructure-related. Deployment of Kerberos
and LDAP comes to mind, and perhaps digging around inside Gitea to understand why it gives 5xx errors to us. Let me know if you have any questions I didn't cover here. I'm excited to get to work with all of you!
==== END INTRO TO JORDAN BOLAND ====

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