runtime.fedora.23-x64.runtime.native.System.Security.Cryptography

Problem

Software developers use programming and design knowledge to build reusable software components. Software components are the basic building blocks for modern applications. Software consumed by an enterprise consists of hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of open source components. Software developers publish components they have authored to public repositories. While a new software project is a welcome addition to the open source community. it is not always prudent to indiscriminately use the latest components when building a commercial application. Irrespective of the software quality, the danger of using components that are rarely used to build applications lies in the fact that the software component may contain novel, currently undetected malicious code. Therefore, it is prudent to review software component behaviors and even try out software component in a sandbox, an environment meant for testing untrusted code.

Prevalence in NuGet community

No prevalence information at this time

Problem

Software developers use programming and design knowledge to build reusable software components. Software components are the basic building blocks for modern applications. Software consumed by an enterprise consists of hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of open source components. Open source communities depend on the work of thousands of software developers that volunteer their time to maintain software components. Software developers build up the reputation of their open source projects by developing in public. Modern source code repositories have many social features that allow software developers to handle bug reports, have discussions with their users, and convey reaching significant project milestones. It is uncommon to find open source projects that omit linking their component to a publicly accessible source code repository.

Prevalence in NuGet community

No prevalence information at this time

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

Fortified functions are usually wrappers around standard glibc functions (such as memcpy) which perform boundary checks either at compile time or run time to determine if a memory violation has occurred. The compiler needs additional context to generate such calls (for example, array size that needs to be known at compile time). Because of this, the compiler will virtually never substitute all viable functions with their fortified counterparts in complex programs. However, lack of any fortified functions may indicate that this compiler feature was not used at all.

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.