Stack-Smashing Protector

Posted by timothy on Sunday August 4, 2002 @08:29AM from the plugging-holes dept.

XNormal writes "It's not exactly new but for some reason it doesn't seem to be getting the attention it deserves. The stack smashing-protector developed by Hiroaki Etoh at IBM's Tokyo Research Lab is a patch for GCC that provides effective protection against buffer overflows. It protects against cases not covered by StackGuard and StackShield. It it well-supported on multiple versions of GCC and multiple platforms. Why is it not getting enough attention? Perhaps it needs a CatchyName instead of 'ssp'? I'll ponder this question while I'm recompiling all my executables that have an open port and the libraries they depend on."

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Many developers just don't want it by maeglin · 2002-08-04 10:19 · Score: 5, Interesting

The reason stack protection stuff isn't being widely used isn't because it's got an obscure name or something simple like that. It's because not everyone can agree whether it's effective or just lures people into a false sense of security. There have been a couple of "discussions" of this on the Linux Kernel Mailing List and the end result is always a stalemate.

dan