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asdfsa32today at 8:43 AM2 repliesview on HN

The issue is that it restricts from locking-down and securing the system with Write xor Execute memory. So it has system wide implication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%5EX


Replies

PhilipRomantoday at 8:57 AM

W^X is typically per mapping, not per memory page and does not interfere with JIT compilation.

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kllrnohjtoday at 12:51 PM

Nonsense, there's no "system wide implications". Mappings are per process, and W^X is just a strategy to help harden individual processes, not the entire system. There's no herd immunity here.

JITs do not grant the ability to bypass any OS/system sandboxes. The lack of W^X doesn't do that, either. If a process opts out of W^X, such as to enable a JIT, it's voluntarily making itself less hardened, but at the end of the day this isn't any more meaningful than the program being allowed to be written in, say, C, which also voluntarily reduces the processes security hardening.

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