"Sarah Addams" at Mar 3, 99 08:07:32 pm said:
> Excuse my ignorance, but would someone explain to me why Linux and other =
> Unices are vulnerable to buffer overflow exploits? I suspect it's =
I had the chance of reading a part of a Microsoft Windows NT driver. I
found a buffer-overflow within half an hour. I suspect that this will
happen with ANY NT driver that you get to inspect. Scanning the source
is a bit more comfortable than writing a program that continually
tries to pass illegal arguments to system calls, because when you
succeeed, you will crash your machine many times before you have
an "exploit".
Exploiting that overflow will obliterate all security checks, as the
driver executes in the kernel addressing space.
The controversy is that by publishing all security problems that you
fix, you give the impression that there are a lot of them, while the
parties that DON"T publicly admit the same problems, will give the
impression of having less bugs.
Personally I prefer having the bugs known and fixed, over semi-known (*)
and unfixed.
Roger.
(*) To use an old example, read all the SunOS-alerts, and try and
apply them to say AIX or HPUX. And the cracker community will pass
the bugs that they find around silently without you noticing....
-- ** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2137555 ** *-- BitWizard writes Linux device drivers for any device you may have! --* * Never blow in a cat's ear because if you do, usually after three or * * four times, they will bite your lips! And they don't let go for at * * least a minute. -- Lisa Coburn, age 9- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/