On 3 September 2014 08:13, Mark Smith mcs@pearlcrescent.com wrote:
I did a quick test on a Mac OS 10.9.4 system and I also confirmed that all of the Firefox binaries are 64-bit. The tor and pluggable transport pieces are still 32-bit (but you already knew that). Would there be any advantage from a security perspective if we also deliver 64-bit binaries for tor and related components?
Speaking generally, not knowing about all the components or specifics - you get some small wins moving to 64 bit - mainly the increased address space for ASLR and defense against practical integer overflow. But it can be dangerous too - Nick's a wonderful programmer but there are classes of bugs that result from 32-64 bit conversions. http://www.viva64.com/en/a/0065/ I would not be surprised if there was _some_ bug somewhere because of it.
I'm not sure if there are other components in the bundle, related to firefox.exe but not part of it's build process, that should be 64bit though.... But I guess if TBB works, it's obviously not _necessary_.
c) anyone else can reproduce a 64 bit build (I'm not going for full reproducibility right now, just a successfull build that is 64 bit)
I need to do some ESR31 patch work first....
Oh, no sweat - this is obviously on-the-side from deliverables =)
-tom