[Mono-dev] The State Of Mono Assembly Verification?

[Sebastien Pouliot]

On Thu, 2006-02-02 at 20:41 +0100, Joachim Ante wrote:
> > A few weeks ago I asked about something related to this, currently when
> > the JIT encounters something it does not like, it bails out in the form
> > of a g_abort, and the question was whether there were any reasons not to
> > try to recover from this gracefully and return an exception.
> > 
> > Zoltan suggested that we should implement a proper verifier, but if the
> > right way of doing verification is by sending the method to the JIT,
> > then we should go down the path I proposed (email pasted at the end).
> I second this. It would be very very useful for us if mono wouldn't g_assert
> but throw exceptions when the dll is invalid/broken/obfuscated/maliciously
> modified.

I believe it would be useful to many people - even if most don't realize
it today. Until then Mono is "restricted" to run trusted code which,
IMHO, "limits" it usefulness (I admit the "limit" is probably rather low
as there are very few applications supporting partial trust today).

Anyway the truth (please feel all free to prove me wrong ;-) is that
security, especially runtime security, hasn't been very popular with
contributors - in any form (e.g. code, samples, reviews, test cases...).

I may be biased but I'm glad that Novell is investing in this (ok I'm
totally biased ;-). However Mono could use a little more global support
and/or contributions in this domain. I guess we could see this as either
a participation or a patience game ;-)
-- 
Sebastien Pouliot  <sebastien at ximian.com>
Blog: http://pages.infinit.net/ctech/