[ Thanks to Sensei
for this link. ]
“The libsafe library protects a process against the
exploitation of buffer overflow vulnerabilities in process stacks.
Libsafe works with any existing pre-compiled executable and can be
used transparently, even on a system-wide basis. The method
intercepts all calls to library functions that are known to be
vulnerable. A substitute version of the corresponding function
implements the original functionality, but in a manner that ensures
that any buffer overflows are contained within the current stack
frame. Libsafe has been shown to detect several known attacks and
can potentially prevent yet unknown attacks. Experiments
indicate that the performance overhead of libsafe is
negligible.”
“Before you begin, you have to check what shared loader version
you have. You should have 1.8.5 or better when using Libsafe 1.3.
If your running SuSE 6.4 then you will have version 1.9.9 unless
you updated to a newer version. To check your version, use the
command ls /lib/ld.so* You will get a directory listing showing
ld.so-*.*.* for example if you had version 1.8.5 then you will see
ld.so-1.8.5 easy enough. If you dont have ld.so-1.8.5 you will need
to update your shared loader. You can get the latest version at
www.gnu.org”
“I’m running Libsafe on SuSE 6.4 using Metro X 4.3.4 and KDE
1.2. There were no issues that I could see other than with Netscape
4.7 which was very slow connecting to my proxy server initially.
KFM nor StarOffice 5.1 had this problem when browsing the web. Just
give Netscape a few extra seconds and if that doesnt work, kill it
and it will work fine the second time around.”