Originally, MKCRYPTO was introduced because the United States
classified cryptography as a munition and restricted its export. The
export controls were substantially relaxed fifteen years ago, and are
essentially irrelevant for software with published source code.
In the intervening time, nobody bothered to remove the option after
its motivation -- the US export restriction -- was eliminated. I'm
not aware of any other operating system that has a similar option; I
expect it is mainly out of apathy for churn that we still have it.
Today, cryptography is an essential part of modern computing -- you
can't use the internet responsibly without cryptography.
The position of the TNF board of directors is that TNF makes no
representation that MKCRYPTO=no satisfies any country's cryptography
regulations.
My personal position is that the availability of cryptography is a
basic human right; that any local laws restricting it to a privileged
few are fundamentally immoral; and that it is wrong for developers to
spend effort crippling cryptography to work around such laws.
As proposed on tech-crypto, tech-security, and tech-userlevel to no
objections:
https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-crypto/2017/05/06/msg000719.htmlhttps://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-security/2017/05/06/msg000928.htmlhttps://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-userlevel/2017/05/06/msg010547.html
P.S. Reviewing all the uses of MKCRYPTO in src revealed a lot of
*bad* crypto that was conditional on it, e.g. DES in telnet... That
should probably be removed too, but on the grounds that it is bad,
not on the grounds that it is (nominally) crypto.
FORTIFY_SOURCE feature of libssp, thus checking the size of arguments to
various string and memory copy and set functions (as well as a few system
calls and other miscellany) where known at function entry. RedHat has
evidently built all "core system packages" with this option for some time.
This option should be used at the top of Makefiles (or Makefile.inc where
this is used for subdirectories) but after any setting of LIB.
This is only useful for userland code, and cannot be used in libc or in
any code which includes the libc internals, because it overrides certain
libc functions with macros. Some effort has been made to make USE_FORT=yes
work correctly for a full-system build by having the bsd.sys.mk logic
disable the feature where it should not be used (libc, libssp iteself,
the kernel) but no attempt has been made to build the entire system with
USE_FORT and doing so will doubtless expose numerous bugs and misfeatures.
Adjust the system build so that all programs and libraries that are setuid,
directly handle network data (including serial comm data), perform
authentication, or appear likely to have (or have a history of having)
data-driven bugs (e.g. file(1)) are built with USE_FORT=yes by default,
with the exception of libc, which cannot use USE_FORT and thus uses
only USE_SSP by default. Tested on i386 with no ill results; USE_FORT=no
per-directory or in a system build will disable if desired.
christos