bacula not compiled with FORTIFY_SOURCE

[Kees Cook]

Binary package hint: bacula

Due to upstream's strange use of redefinable extern unions, fortify has unfriendly behavior. It would be nice to fix this in a sensible fashion so that the rest of bacula could get fortify protections.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=1201561365.3289.15.camel%40loki.lausch.at

[Kern Sibbald (kern)]

This problem *should* already be fixed in the trunk, though I have never actually tried building and running it with fortify source.

We *strongly* recommend not to enable fortify source. Bacula is already well protected and has its own buffer overrun detection that in general detects most overrun problems earlier and better than glibc and produces a reasonable traceback in the process. If you do enable fortify source, we cannot exclude that you will encounter other such problems.

[Kees Cook (kees)]

Yeah, this is mostly a place-holder bug so we can review the roll-out of fortify-source distro-wide. Thanks for looking into it! It does seem clear that glibc got confused about the union size.

[Kern Sibbald (kern)]

This ticket is a bit old. Could someone please try turning on fortify source with a current 5.2.x version
and see if there is a problem. If there is I will fix it. That said, I still recommend against using fortify
source, as I previously wrote, Bacula has all its own routines since 10 years so adding fortify source
will only add unnecessary additional overhead.

Just the same, I would like to see this ticket closed one way or another.