Security

Stack Clash mitigation in GCC: Why -fstack-check is not the answer

Stack Clash mitigation in GCC: Why -fstack-check is not the answer

jeffreyalaw
By Jeff Law

In our previous article about Stack Clash, we covered the basics of the Stack Clash vulnerability. To summarize, an attacker first uses various means to bring the heap and stack close together. A large stack allocation is then used to “jump the stack guard.” Subsequent stores into the stack may modify objects in the heap or vice versa. This, in turn, can be used by attackers to gain control over applications.

GCC has a capability (-fstack-check), which looked promising for mitigating Stack Clash attacks. This article will cover how -fstack-check works and why it is insufficient for mitigating Stack Clash attacks.

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Five layers of security for Red Hat Data Grid on OpenShift

Five layers of security for Red Hat Data Grid on OpenShift

kashukla
By Kapil Shukla

Red Hat Data Grid is an in-memory, distributed, NoSQL datastore solution. With it, your applications can access, process, and analyze data at in-memory speed to deliver a superior user experience. In-memory Data Grid has a variety of use cases in today’s environment, such as fast data access for low-latency apps, storing objects (NoSQL) in a datastore, achieving linear scalability with data distribution/partitioning, and data high-availability across geographies, among many others. With containers getting more attention, the need to have Data Grid running on a container platform like OpenShift is clear, and we are seeing more and more customers aligning their architecture with a datastore running natively on a container platform.

In this article, I will talk about multiple layers of security available while deploying Data Grid on OpenShift. The layers of security offer a combination of security measures provided by Data Grid as well as by OpenShift/Kubernetes.

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Introduction to using libFuzzer with llvm-toolset

Introduction to using libFuzzer with llvm-toolset

tstellard
By Tom Stellard

“Fuzzing” an application is a great way to find bugs that may be missed by other testing methods. Fuzzers test programs by generating random string inputs and feeding them into an application. Any program that accepts arbitrary inputs from its users is a good candidate for fuzzing. This includes compilers, interpreters, web applications, JSON or YAML parsers, and many more types of programs.

libFuzzer is a library to assist with the fuzzing of applications and libraries. It is integrated into the Clang C compiler and can be enabled for your application with the addition of a compile flag and by adding a fuzzing target to your code. libFuzzer has been used successfully to find bugs in many programs, and in this article, I will show how you can integrate libFuzzer into your own applications.

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Transitioning Red Hat SSO to a highly-available hybrid cloud deployment

Transitioning Red Hat SSO to a highly-available hybrid cloud deployment

jblashka
By Jared Blashka

About two years ago, Red Hat IT finished migrating our customer-facing authentication system to Red Hat Single Sign-On (Red Hat SSO). As a result, we were quite pleased with the performance and flexibility of the new platform. Due to some architectural decisions that were made in order to optimize for uptime using the technologies at our disposal, we were unable to take full advantage of Red Hat SSO’s robust feature set until now. This article describes how we’re now addressing database and session replication between global sites.

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Red Hat Single Sign-On: Give it a try for no cost!

Red Hat Single Sign-On: Give it a try for no cost!

nmasse
By Nicolas Massé

In a software world where each day is more hostile than the previous one, security matters and developers are coping with more and more non-functional requirements about security. The most common ones are the “OWASP Top 10”: the ten security risks that every developer should know. There are many more security risks you should care about, but those ten risks are the ones having the most impact on the security of your software. Among them are authentication and access control.

The good news is that authentication and access control are now commodities in the open source world, thanks to Red Hat Single Sign-On Red Hat Single Sign-On is an access management tool that takes care of the details of most authentication protocols such as SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect; user consent with UMA; and even access control. It is easy to use, is very well-documented, and has a very active community: Keycloak.

This article describes how to download and install Red Hat Single Sign-On for no cost.

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Using a public certificate with Red Hat Single Sign-On/Keycloak

Using a public certificate with Red Hat Single Sign-On/Keycloak

nmasse
By Nicolas Massé

When deploying Red Hat Single Sign-On/Keycloak for a test or a proof of concept, most users will choose to use a self-signed certificate as explained in the official documentation.

The setup instructions are straightforward, but this self-signed certificate will trigger certificate error messages in your web browser and can also prevent some clients such as Postman from working properly.

This article explains how to use a public certificate from Let’s Encrypt with Red Hat Single Sign-On.

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Annocheck: Examining the contents of binary files

Annocheck: Examining the contents of binary files

nickclifton
By Nick Clifton

The Annobin plugin for GCC stores extra information inside binary files as they are compiled.  Examining this information used to be performed by a set of shell scripts, but that has now changed and a new program—annocheck—has been written to do the job.  The advantage of the program is that it is faster and more flexible than the scripts, and it does not rely upon other utilities to actually peer inside the binaries.

This article is about the annocheck program: how to use it, how it works, and how to extend it. The program’s main purpose is to examine how a binary was built and to check that it has all of the appropriate security hardening features enabled. But that is not its only use.  It also has several other modes that perform different kinds of examination of binary files.

Another feature of annocheck is that it was designed to be easily extensible. It provides a framework for dissecting binary files and a set of utilities to help with this examination. It also knows how to handle archives, RPMs, and directories, presenting the contents of these to each tool as a series of ordinary files. Thus, tools need only worry about the specific tasks they want to carry out.

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How to manually copy SSH public keys to servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

How to manually copy SSH public keys to servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

lufimtse
By Leo Ufimtsev

We often use ssh-copy-id to copy ssh keys from our local Linux computers to RHEL servers in order to connect without typing in a password. This is not only for convenience; it enables you to script and automate tasks that involve remote machines.  Also, using ssh keys correctly is considered a best practice.  If you are conditioned to respond with your password every time you are prompted, you might not notice a prompt that isn’t legitimate (for example, spoofed).

What about when you can’t use ssh-copy-id or the target user ID doesn’t have a password (for example, an Ansible service user)? This article explains how to do it manually and avoid the common pitfall of forgetting to set the proper permissions.

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Securing .NET Core on OpenShift using HTTPS

Securing .NET Core on OpenShift using HTTPS

tdeseyn
By Tom Deseyn

In an effort to improve security, browsers have become stricter in warning users about sites that aren’t properly secured with SSL/TLS. ASP.NET Core 2.1 has improved support for HTTPS. You can read more about these enhancements in Improvements to using HTTPS. In this blog post, we’ll look at how you can add HTTPS to your ASP.NET Core applications deployed on Red Hat OpenShift.

Before we get down to business, let’s recap some OpenShift vocabulary and HTTPS fundamentals. If you are familiar, you can skip over these sections.

OpenShift, pods, services, routes, and S2I

OpenShift is a Kubernetes-based open-source container application platform. A Kubernetes pod is a set of containers that must be deployed on the same host. In most cases, a pod consists of a single container. When we run the same application in several pods, a service does the load balancing across those pods. A route makes a service accessible externally via a hostname.

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