Hi Colin, On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 20:13:44 -0700, Colin Percival wrote: >Dolan- Gavitt, Brendan F. wrote: >> I've been trying for the past few days to come up with a method for >> checking a FreeBSD system to see if it is vulnerable to an issue >> described by a FreeBSD security advisory in some automated way [...]
This is an issue I also have given some thought to. ... >> I'm fairly new to FreeBSD, so I may just be missing something >> here--is there a reliable way to determine if a system is patched >> according to a particular security advisory? > >In short, no. If you have any ideas, let me know. :-) I've been canonically rebuilding my systems for each patch (or at least every time a vulnerability affects my hosts) to cover this very issue, even if a rebuild isn't strictly necessary. In addition to this, however, I usually generate an mtree file from a pre-production installation so that I can compare any given build with running systems to identify changes, such as those occurring as a result of patching - kind of like a base 'tripwire', in fact. Would this be a solution? Each advisory could come with a custom mtree file that covers the affected files explicitly and/or another mtree file that covers the files for this patch _and_ for all previous patches up to that point; you could name the mtree after the patchlevel eg RELENG_5_3.mtree.p31 - this should work, regardless of how the patch was applied as the end result is (almost?) always the same at the binary level. regards, -- Joel Hatton -- Infrastructure Manager | Hotline: +61 7 3365 4417 AusCERT - Australia's national CERT | Fax: +61 7 3365 7031 The University of Queensland | WWW: www.auscert.org.au Qld 4072 Australia | Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-security To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
