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Ariel Ben-Yehuda
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add comment about objtool
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text/3855-mitigation-enforcement.md

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@@ -350,12 +350,22 @@ for them.
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This is somewhat hard to do with an external tool, since there is
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no way of looking at a binary and telling what mitigations its components
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have (for example [`hardening-check(1)`], exists, but its check for
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stack smashing protection only checks that at least 1 function has stack
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cookies, rather than checking that every interesting function has it
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enabled).
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have.
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There are howevever some external tools that do check for mitigations:
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1. [`hardening-check(1)`] exists, but its check for stack smashing protection only
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checks that at least 1 function has stack cookies, rather than checking that
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every interesting function has it enabled.
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2. The Linux kernel has [`objtool`], which checks for some other mitigations (for
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example, retpolines). It however needs to access the `.o` object files
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rather than to the final linked executable or shared library - which
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requires its user to control the linking process - and also has hardcoded
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limitations that make it only suitable for the Linux kernel, rather than
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being useful as a general-purpose tool.
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[`hardening-check(1)`]: https://manpages.debian.org/testing/devscripts/hardening-check.1.en.html
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[`objtool`]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/tools/objtool/Documentation/objtool.txt?id=5cd64d4f92683afa691a6b83dcad5adfb2165ed0
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## .note.gnu.property
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