This is the latest release of PittSFIeld, a tool for sandboxing
arbitrary x86 binary programs.

Sandboxing, also known as software-based fault isolation (SFI), is a
technique to enforce security policies constraining memory access and
control flow in untrusted binary code. It directly modifies software
at the instruction level to efficiently check that memory addresses
and jump targets lie only in designated safe data and code regions.
More information about PittSFIeld, including academic papers
describing its approach in detail, can be found at the project web
site, at:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/smcc/projects/pittsfield/

This distribution includes the rewriting and verification tools (Perl
scripts rewrite.pl and verify.pl), as well as an example application
consisting of a program to load fault-isolated object files (loader.c)
and an implementation of parts of the C standard library (libc.[ch])
in which some routines are rewritten and linked with the sandboxed
code (and so untrusted), and others make calls out of the sandbox to
trusted stubs.

Required software:
GCC (most recently tested with version 4.4.5)
GNU binutils (most recently tested with version 2.20.1)
Perl (most recently tested with version 5.10.1)
libelf (most recently tested with version 0.8.13)

Previous versions have worked with tools as old as GCC 3.3.5, binutils
2.15, Perl 5.8.4, and libelf 0.8.5, and no major incompatible changes
have been made, so any version in those ranges will probably work with
little effort.

This version also includes a second implementation of the verifier
that runs in C inside the loader. It requires the libdisasm x86
disassembly library, which is available from

http://bastard.sourceforge.net/libdisasm.html

The code in this release was last tested with libdisasm 0.23, which is
slightly incompatible with the version used by earlier PittSFIeld
versions.

There is not yet any documentation, sorry. The top-level tool is the
"pittsfield-gcc.pl" script, which acts as a substitute C compiler: use
it with the "-c" option to each ".c" file of your program into a ".o"
file, and then with a list of all the ".o" files to create either a
".fio" file (representing a complete sandboxed object, including the
stub C library) or a compiled copy of the loader with the path to a
.fio file hard-coded.

Running "make" in this directory will compile the loader and two
"Hello, world!" sandboxed modules, one using the C library and one
using the C++ library. To run them, say:

./loader-classic hw.fio
./loader-classic hw-c++.fio

By default, the Makefile compiles modules with the "classic" memory
layout, with 16MB code and data regions. Two other layouts, "medium"
and "large", are also supported; to use them, use the SIZE Makefile
option and the corresponding loader binary:

make clean
make SIZE=large hw.fio loader-large
./loader-large hw.fio

Note that this is still a research prototype: neither of the supplied
verifiers has yet been sufficiently reviewed to recommend the use of
PittSFIeld in security-critical production environments. Though the
two verifiers have been cross-checked and a number of problems have
been fixed, they were written by the same developer, and it is likely
that additional problems exist. Also, there are some known gaps in the
checking performed by the load-time verifier: it treats all x87
floating-point instructions as equivalent, and it allows modification
of segment registers and use of non-standard segments.

PittSFIeld is Copyright (C) 2004-2006,2008-2010, Stephen McCamant.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, as
published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
02110-1301 USA