New Tools Layout Released Today
28 January, 2015 - 15:12 — RaTI'm happy to announce that we have released our new layout for the tools section of the site today. The interface was done by one of our recruits, revall, and the backend changes were completed by cisc0ninja before he retired. We welcome any suggestions on improving our site at the appropriate area of the forums. In other news, our weekly meetings have been going well. We hope to see more new faces this Thursday in IRC.
Shinobi Promoted to Crew, IRC Meetings Resume Today
8 January, 2015 - 10:14 — RaTThe first announcement is fairly big since we haven't let anybody into our crew since November 15, 2012. It is with great honor that I would like to announce the High Council's decision to promote Shinobi to the status of full crew member of SOLDIERX. Shinobi is now the head of Operations for all of SX (essentially what I've been doing all of these years). As with all members promoted to the status of full crew, we hope that Shinobi will continue his efforts and show the same enthusiasm and workmanship that he showed during his inductee status. Congratulations!
After two weeks of no IRC meetings due to the holidays, our weekly meetings will resume today. As with our last IRC meeting, we will have it from noon to one (12:00-13:00) EST and then again at nine to ten (21:00-22:00) EST. We're having two time slots in hopes that everybody who wants to attend will be able to make one of the sessions. Hope to see you all there!
cisc0ninja Retires, Open IRC Meetings Every Thursday
13 December, 2014 - 20:28 — RaTcisc0ninja has decided to retire from SX. He has stated that he's not currently interested in computer security, so there's no place for him here in SX. He has moved onto gaming, so if anybody plays Elder Scrolls Online - feel free to reach out to him and join him in game. We're leaving his [email protected] email account open.
Since the majority (91%) voted that they would attend a chat session where members of SOLDIERX would answer any question they wanted, we are now starting that as a weekly IRC chat on Thursday. Our current plan is to have it from noon to one (12:00-13:00) EST and then again at nine to ten (21:00-22:00) EST. We're having two time slots in hopes that everybody who wants to attend will be able to make one of the sessions. Our first meeting will be this Thursday, December 18, 2014. Hope to see you all there!
HardenedBSD and the Offset2lib Attack
6 December, 2014 - 12:45 — latteraThe recently disclosed offset2lib attack against Linux's default ASLR implementation has generated a lot of chatter. As mentioned in the paper, ASLR implementations based off of PaX's--which is the case for HardenedBSD--are generally secured against this attack. Our whitepaper describes how we calculate separate offsets for the execution base, mmap, and the stack. For Position-Independent Executables (PIEs), the shared objects have a different randomization offset than the executable itself.
While HardenedBSD is secure against this particular attack, further additions to our implementation can help strengthen it. Since each shared object is randomized with the same delta, the same attack could theoretically be carried out in between libraries. Research is being done in HardenedBSD to randomize the base address of each shared object independent of the other shared objects. This would strengthen HardenedBSD against similar attacks. Additional research is being done to randomize the load order of shared libraries as well. OpenBSD does this to further frustrate an attacker as he or she will not be able to know beforehand in which order the libraries will be loaded.
Crowdfunding HardenedBSD Development Server
31 October, 2014 - 20:46 — latteraWe're working hard to bring the FreeBSD community (and the Internet community as a whole) many security enhancements. We're looking to build an automated infrastructure along with providing our developers a system to do dedicated development on. We're paying everything out of pocket and our expenses are quite high, even as a new project. As such, we've started a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for a dedicated development server. If you want to see HardenedBSD succeed and be given public credit for that help, please head over to the Indiegogo page and give a donation. Even if you can't donate, we'd love it if you could spread the word. We need all the help we can get. We deeply appreciate all the help and support the community has already given us.
Organizational Changes Coming, Feedback Requested
23 October, 2014 - 16:09 — RaTWe're currently planning some organizational changes as well as trying to figure out where we should focus our work. Feel free to comment on this news post with things you would like to see. We're planning to bring some contests either late this month or early next month. Last but not least, we have a poll about hosting a weekly or monthly IRC chat where members of SX will answer any question you have. Please click here and let us know if you would attend such an event.
