This month was spent in writing utilities and libraries for HardenedBSD's infrastructure. I wrote a little library, called liblattzfs, to help our infrastructure monitoring daemon (hbsdmon) monitor the various ZFS pools on our systems. Though liblattzfs is developed out-of-tree, I've already merged it into the source tree.

I also worked on another library, liblattutil, to make it so that our applications can have one centralized logging API. It also has a nifty SQLite3 wrapper. One could use this wrapper to convert a SQLite3 query's result to JSON. :-)

I created a new little application (rync) to convert our every-six-hour auto-sync scripts from csh to C.

I also disabled CFI for wpa_supplicant. It's my hope that one day, I/we finally get Cross-DSO CFI working in base so that we can re-add CFI to some of these applications. I'm hoping to get back to Cross-DSO CFI work in the coming week.

FreeBSD released some securty advisories, so I made sure that we had binary updates released in a timely fashion. The package builds are still running.

FreeBSD updated ports-mgmt/pkg from 1.16.3 to 1.17.1, introducing some major changes that caused issues with our package repo. It took me a few days to find and resolve the issues. If anyone else notices any issues with the package repo itself, please let me know.

Loic reported an issue with randompid calculation, so I fixed that. He also fixed a few ports and researched the failures of a few others.

Overall, August was a month spent on HardenedBSD's auxiliary applications with the goal of enhanced stability.

liblattzfs: https://git.hardenedbsd.org/shawn.webb/liblattzfs
liblattutil: https://git.hardenedbsd.org/shawn.webb/liblattutil
rync: https://git.hardenedbsd.org/hardenedbsd/rync

HardenedBSD saw a lot of work in May 2021. Here are the most notable changes:

1. We hardened the kenv(2) syscall. Unprivileged or jailed users, even a jailed privileged account, should not be able to inspect the kernel environment. This is just one more hardening technique to mitigate "kernel infoleak as feature" type of issue.
2. We fixed an issue with our ASLR implementation interfering with FreeBSD's ASR implementation. This was due to a mismerge a while ago when FreeBSD made changes to their ASR implementation and we had to adjust ours in the ELF image activator.
3. We bumped bhyve's max vCPU count to 48 from 16. HardenedBSD's infrastructure now has systems with greater than 30 cores, so being arbitrarily limited to 16 meant we weren't utilizing the server to its greatest potential.
4. We hardened dumping non-dumpable memory mappings. FreeBSD implemented an interface to tell the kernel "even though this mapping has been marked as non-dumpable, go ahead and dump it when dumping a process' core."
5. FreeBSD's random stack gap implementation creates problems for certain applications, like ntpd. Rather than fix the issue, FreeBSD is explicitly disabling the stack gap for certain applications. We reverted those changes and are carrying on like normal.
6. We performed network maintenance. The build infrastructure's firewall is now directly connected to the internet, rather than being behind the corporate firewall. This should drastically help increase the robustness of the network, especially our IPv6 setup.
7. If you boot in UEFI mode, you'll notice a new bootloader screen. Thanks to Loic, HardenedBSD's logo should be nice and pretty on the UEFI bootloader screen.
8. Loic and I fixed some ports entries, getting errant ports to compile again in our package builds.
9. We're researching GitLab anti-spam measures. Ben La Monica from the HardenedBSD Foundation Board of Directors has been kindly maintaining our GitLab instance. We may experiment with different anti-spam measures and may experience minimal downtime as we do that research.
10. And for the big one: We now build (nearly) all of 14-CURRENT/amd64 world with LTO, including libraries. We introduced a new build configuration, MK_LTOLIB, to tell the build framework whether to build static/shared libraries with LTO. As a precursor to supporting Cross-DSO CFI, we must build as much of the base OS with LTO as possible. This gets us closer to our goal of an OS with Cross-DSO CFI fully enabled for the userland. The compiler toolchain, libthr, and the various bootloaders are NOT compiled with LTO. A set of one or more follow-up commits will enable LTO for arm64 as well. We're doing our first package build with amd64 as we speak. It will still be a while before we support Cross-DSO CFI, but this is a great step in the right direction.

I'm excited for the progress we're making. I'm grateful to serve the community and I'm more grateful for the community's support.

In April, HardenedBSD added a new developer named Loic! Loic is primarily focused on cleaning up old cruft in the HardenedBSD project and fixing bugs. It's my hope that, with time and increasing familiarity, he takes on more complex projects. Please join me in a warm welcome.

Just yesterday (30 Apr 2021), I set up the new 12-STABLE/amd64 nightly build server. After months of being offline, we are now building 12-STABLE every night again. I also updated all the servers/VMs/jails in our infrastructure.

I taught hbsd-update how to force IPv4 or IPv6. We now support the typical "-4" and "-6" options that most network applications support.

secadm is having issues right now. We're investigating the right fix. So, if you use secadm for toggling exploit mitigations, you'll probably want to use hbsd-control for now.

This month, I worked on finding and fixing the regression that caused kernel panics on our package builders. I think I found the issue: I made it so that the HARDENEDBSD amd64 kernel just included GENERIC so that we follow FreeBSD's toggling of features. Doing so added QUEUE_MACRO_DEBUG_TRASH to our kernel config. That option is the likely culprit. If the next package build (with the option removed) completes, I will commit the change that removes QUEUE_MACRO_DEBUG_TRASH from the HARDENEDBSD amd64 kernel.

I still have one new server to set up. I plan to use it for our 12-STABLE builds. I enabled the 14-CURRENT/arm64 nightly builds and we've now completed two production package builds.

I'm giving a virtual presentation on 07 Apr 2021 I'm giving titled "HardenedBSD 2021 State of the Hardened Union." It details the work we've been doing since the last HardenedBSD State of the Union.

As part of that presentation, I'd like to highlight areas in which HardenedBSD is used. If you or your employer uses HardenedBSD and would like me to add a slide about it, please reach out to me.

In April, I plan to focus on the ports tree. I'm going to audit all the ports that fail to build and determine if I can easily get them to build. A large number of ports ignore our setting -fPIC and -fPIE compiler flags and subsequently fail to build.

Jason Donenfeld of the Wireguard project is looking for a maintainer/developer for the Wireguard FreeBSD kernel module. If you are familiar with the networking kernel code and would like to help, please reach out to me. I'll get you in touch with Jason. I'm hoping that the HardenedBSD community can fill a gap where the FreeBSD community failed: developing a robust in-kernel Wireguard implementation properly blessed by the Wireguard project. I would be happy to dedicate some HardenedBSD infrastructure resources to help support this effort. Those resources include, but are not limited to: a repo on our self-hosted git server and a VM for nightly builds.

Happy New Year! On this the last day of 2020, I submit December's status report.

FreeBSD recently switched its source (/usr/src) repo from subversion to git. This switch had a major impact on HardenedBSD. This month was spent almost entirely on that impact. I had planned to work on Cross-DSO CFI this month, but I wasn't able to find any time for that.

I spent some time with my Foundation administrative hat on. I sent emails to recent donors, asking them whether they wanted to be listed on the donor's page. If you have donated and haven't received an email from me, please reach out.

This month alone, the community blew through our 2020 donation goal. We received around $13,000 USD in December 2020. We are immensely thankful for those who contribute. Monetary donations go straight to improving the project. In January, we will purchase a new server to replace our existing self-hosted Gitea server.

It has been an honor to serve you, the HardenedBSD Community, in 2020. I'm grateful for the continued opportunity to serve in 2021. Our Roadmap page hasn't been updated in three years now. In January, I will be updating the roadmap.