Security

There are a few things that we should evaluate within the compiler and runtime to improve security.

Non-Executable Stacks

This is easy, but when we generate assembler, we need to specify a special bit of code to enable non-executable stacks. This is important for the HARP backend. This can be done via a linker flag or a bit of assembler.

There is a good write up of this provided by Gentoo Linux.

This has been addressed for the 2013.1 release.

Hashtable attacks

A recent source of attacks on systems has been to exploit weaknesses in hashing algorithms. We need to take a good look at this.