realpath(3) et al

[Jason Stone]

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> Protecting against stack smashing is quite important; I think many
> hosting environments not using LISP or other executable-stack-reliant
> packages would benefit from this. By negating the ability to execute
> injected code through a buffer overflow, security is highly increased.

I think that this topic has come up before on the list - please check the
archives before you get into it again.

I think that the consensus has been something along the lines of, it would
be nice, _but_:

1) It requires ugly tricks to implement on i386;
2) It does not canonically stop the exploitation of buffer overruns -
   yes, it stops the current attacks, but the underlying problem that an
   attacker can change the flow of program execution remains;
3) It would break a whole bunch of stuff.


 -Jason

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