RFC: Should the linker warn about and/or control the propagation of audit libraries ?
Project / Subsystem
binutils / binutils
Date
2026-07-28
Proposer
Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com>
Source type
public_inbox
Consensus
Proposed
Sentiment
6/10
Technical tradeoffs
- • Adding control over audit library propagation enhances security but introduces complexity in build configurations.
- • Changing the default behavior might break existing build processes that rely on silent propagation.
All attributes
- project
- binutils
- subsystem
- binutils
- patch_id
- —
- discussion_id
- 87mrvb2zdb.fsf@redhat.com
- source_type
- public_inbox
- title
- RFC: Should the linker warn about and/or control the propagation of audit libraries ?
- headline
- Linker warning for audit library propagation
- tldr
- RFC: Should the linker warn about or control the automatic propagation of audit libraries?
- proposer
- Nick Clifton <nickc@redhat.com>
- consensus
- Proposed
- outcome
- proposed
- sentiment_score
- 6
- technical_tradeoffs
-
- • Adding control over audit library propagation enhances security but introduces complexity in build configurations.
- • Changing the default behavior might break existing build processes that rely on silent propagation.
- series_id
- —
- series_role
- cover
- series_parts
- []
- tags
-
- • security
- • linker
- • elf
- • dynamic linking
- • audit libraries
- bugzilla_url
- —
- date
- 2026-07-28T00:00:00.000Z
RFC: Should the linker warn about and/or control the propagation of audit libraries ?
An AI tool flagged a potential security issue where the linker silently propagates audit library entries (DT_AUDIT) from input shared libraries to output binaries as DT_DEPAUDIT. This allows a malicious library to force the runtime loader to load an attacker-controlled audit library without user intervention or warning. The proposal is to introduce a new linker option --audit-library-propagation with levels like default, silent, warn, or refuse to control this behavior.