Hey all,

We're getting close to the end of November. My wife and I have plans this weekend, so I thought I'd take the time to write November's status report today.

On amd64, with commit fd35ed2087409c7ae83ed6cf8ec041d47432a758, I added the HARDENEDBSD-NODEBUG kernel. Note that this disables INVARIANTS, which has a lot of security side-benefits due to assertion checking. Disabling INVARIANTS also means enabling PAX_INSECURE_MODE.

I've been working on the ports tree, updating more ports that need extra CFLAGS/LDFLAGS and/or need ports-based hardening features disabled (like PIE, RELRO+BIND_NOW).

I've worked on merging in some code and documentation contributions. We had our first vendor code contribution this month. I still need to review and merge in their patch for the hardening-check port.

Our self-hosted git server is still experiencing issues, but is still getting more stable as time goes on. We've noticed malicious bot scanning activity over our Tor Onion Service endpoints that put a lot of pressure on Gitea, to the point of crashing Gitea. Happens every other week or so.

There's some work that I failed to highlight in October:

1. Per-thread stacks. We apply both a new delta to mmap(MAP_STACK) and libthr's _thr_stack_alloc(). The delta is is disabled when the hardening.pax.aslr.status syctl node/tunable is set to 1 or 0, or if ASLR is disabled for the process. I need to determine a way to disable the additional randomization added in libthr so that ports like sbcl work again. sbcl requires a deterministic memory layout.
2. I hardeninged the debug.dump_modinfo flag. Only privileged, unjailed accounts can now access debug.dump_modinfo.

I took a brief look at Cross-DSO CFI again, merging in the latest changes from hardened/current/master into the Cross-DSO CFI feature branch. It seems that FreeBSD's switch to ZFS-on-Linux as the new basis for the upstream repo, the ZFS utilities (/sbin/zpool, /sbin/zfs) and perhaps libraries violate Cross-DSO CFI in some form or fashion. I need to set up a UFS VM and test ZFS regressions there, because it's not possible to boot a userland with Cross-DSO CFI and root-on-ZFS anymore.

In early December, I plan to catch up on HardenedBSD administrative tasks, like reaching out to October and November's donors to see if they want to be listed on the donor's page. (We default to keeping donations anonymous given the security and privacy aspects HardenedBSD promots.)

Cross-DSO CFI will start becoming my main focus again as we go into 2021. Cross-DSO CFI is a hard beast to wrangle when you have to maintain millions of lines of code in the base OS _and_ 33,000+ ports/packages built on top of that. It's a huge effort, and I'm happy to be the guinea pig for llvm's implementation of CFI in a complete OS ecosystem (base OS + third-party programs/packages.)

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.

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 ====