HardenedBSD August 2020 Status Report and Call for Donations

This last month has largely been a quiet one. I've restarted work on porting five-year-old work from the Code Pointer Integrity (CPI) project into HardenedBSD. Chiefly, I've started forward-porting the libc and rtld bits from the CPI project and now need to look at llvm compiler/linker enhancements. We need to be able to apply SafeStack to shared objects, not just application binaries. This forward-porting work I'm doing is to support that effort.

The infrastructure has settled and is now churning normally and happily. We're still working out bandwidth issues. We hope to have a new fiber line ran by the end of September.

As part of this status report, I'm issuing a formal call for donations. I'm aiming for $4,000.00 USD for a newer self-hosted Gitea server. I hope to purchase the new server before the end of 2020.

Last year, I migrated us away from GitHub as the source-of-truth for HardenedBSD's source code and ports tree. The server hosting the source is a rather ancient one (a > 10yo Dell R410) with insufficient CPU and RAM. I'm formally calling for donations to go towards a newer server to host our code.

I wanted to self-host our source for a couple reasons:

1. A single source-of-truth under our control that we can monitor and guarantee the security of.
2. Provide unique access to the HardenedBSD ecosystem. We provide Tor Onion Services for those who need it. We plan to deploy other mixnets, anonymization services, and privacy-related tech for reaching HardenedBSD's infrastructure in unique ways.

We use Gitea as our code sharing platform. It has a similar look and feel to GitHub and provides bug reporting, wiki, and pull request features.

Given that HardenedBSD is downstream from FreeBSD, which shares a history greater than twenty five years, this places a huge burden on Gitea. It's having a hard time on our hand-me-down Dell R410 system and desperately needs an upgrade.

We appreciate every type of contribution--whether it be financial, code, documentation, advocacy, or otherwise. HardenedBSD would not exist without the continued help and support from the community.

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