NetVips.Native.linux-x64

Problem

Software license is a legal instrument that governs the use and distribution of software source code and its binary representation. Software publishers have the freedom to choose any commonly used or purposefully written license to publish their work under. While some licenses are liberal and allow almost any kind of distribution, with or without code modification, other licenses are more restrictive and impose rules for their inclusion in other software projects. Weak copyleft licenses in particular impose requirements that the user must be able to replace or update the code they apply to. In practical terms, that means the object and library files that statically link to weak copyleft code must be made available publicly. For commercial applications, this is typically undesirable. Therefore, statically linking to weak copyleft code is commonly avoided or even prohibited by the organization policy. Instead of linking statically to weak copyleft licensed code, it is recommended to isolate such code into modules that the publisher-developed, first-party code can dynamically link to without the aforementioned obligations.

Problem

Software components sometimes need to interact with higher privilege parts of the operating system, often requiring administrative access to accomplish a task. Operating systems include a complete network stack with many services that allow the machine to connect to the internet. Some of these services are used to secure network access. For that reason, attackers often aim to tamper with system network settings. Disabling firewalls and other network security features enable the malicious code to execute without being blocked. While the presence of code that tampers with system network settings does not necessarily imply malicious intent, all of its uses in a software package should be documented and approved. Only select applications should consider using functions that interact with system network settings. One example of acceptable use for such functions is allowing specialized applications to use non-standard network ports by updating the firewall allowlist.

Problem

On Linux, external symbols are resolved via the procedure linkage table (PLT) and the global offset table (GOT). Without any protection, both are writable at runtime and thus leave the executable vulnerable to pointer hijacking - an attack where the function address is overwritten with an address of a malicious function. Pointer hijacking can be mitigated by using full read-only relocations, which instruct the compiler to unify global offset tables into a single read-only table. This requires that all external function symbols are resolved at load-time instead of during execution, and may increase loading time for large programs.

Problem

Digital signatures are applied to applications, packages and documents as a cryptographically secured authenticity record. Signatures verify the origin and the integrity of the object they apply to. The integrity validation relies on the cryptographic strength of the encryption and the hash verification algorithm. If either of the two is considered weak by current standards, there is a chance the signed object could be maliciously modified, without triggering the integrity failure check.

Problem

Digital signatures are applied to applications, packages and documents as a cryptographically secured authenticity record. Signatures are made using digital certificates, which can either be purchased from certificate authorities or be self-issued. When a certificate is purchased from a certificate authority, the subject that requests it goes through an identity validation process. Depending on the certificate type, those checks can be basic or extended. Confirming the subject identity is a multi-step process, and the requesting subject can be mapped to its legal entity name only through extended validation of submitted documents. Extended identity validation typically costs more, and it takes longer for a certificate to be issued when this process is correctly followed.