Title: sys-kernel/hardened-sources removal Author: Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera Posted: 2017-08-19 Revision: 10 News-Item-Format: 2.0 Display-If-Installed: sys-kernel/hardened-sources As you may know the core of sys-kernel/hardened-sources have been the grsecurity patches. Sadly, their developers have stopped making these patches freely available [1]. This is a full stop of any public updates and not only stable ones as was announced two years ago[2]. As a result, the Gentoo Hardened team is unable to keep providing further updates of the patches, and although the hardened-sources have proved (when using a hardened toolchain) being resistant against certain attacks like the stack guard page jump techniques proposed by Stack Clash, we can't ensure a regular patching schedule and therefore, the security of the users of these kernel sources. Because of that we will be masking the hardened-sources on the 27th of August and will proceed to remove them from the tree by the end of September. Obviously, we will reinstate the package again if the developers decide to make their patches publicly available again. Our recommendation is that users should consider using instead sys-kernel/gentoo-sources. As an alternative, for users happy keeping themselves on the stable 4.9 branch of the kernel; minipli, another grsecurity user, is forward porting the patches on [3]. Strcat from Copperhead OS is making his own version with some additional hardening features over those on the latest version of the Linux tree at [4]. The Gentoo Hardened team can't make any statement regarding the security, reliability or update availability of either of those patches as we aren't providing them and can't therefore make any recommendation regarding their use. We'd like to note that all the userspace hardening and MAC support for SELinux provided by Gentoo Hardened will still remain in the packages found in the Gentoo repository. Keep in mind, though, that the security provided by these features will be weakened a bit when using sys-kernel/gentoo-sources. Also, all PaX related packages, except sys-kernel/hardened-sources, will remain available for the time being. [1] https://grsecurity.net/passing_the_baton.php [2] https://www.gentoo.org/support/news-items/2015-10-21-future- support-of-hardened-sources-kernel.html [3] https://github.com/minipli/linux-unofficial_grsec [4] https://github.com/copperhead/linux-hardened