Re: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 3 *Beta* Availability Announcement

[Jakub Jelinek <jakub redhat com>]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 09:44:35PM -0400, Jay Lee wrote:
> 
> taroon-list redhat com said:
> >  - Addition of the exec-shield and PIE (Position Independent
> >     Executable) features, which provide protection against stack,
> >     buffer or function pointer overflows, and against other types
> >     of security exploits that rely on overwriting data structures in
> >     memory.
> >
> >  - Addition of NX support for 32-bit x86 architectures in addition to
> >     AMD64 and Intel(r) EM64T.  NX technology restricts execution of
> >     program code in specific areas of memory such as the stack or
> >     the heap, preventing many common buffer overflow security
> >     vulnerabilities.
> 
> Will 3rd party packages require recompiling in order to take advantage of
> ExecShield and NX support?

Depends on where they were compiled/linked.
If on RHEL3 GA or later, they will be already marked as requiring or not
requiring executable stack (special care needs to be given for .S/.s sources
though, they default to requiring executable stack).

	Jakub