Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories
From: Marcin Owsiany <marcin () owsiany pl>
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 00:28:02 +0100
On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 at 01:16:44PM +0100, cees-bart wrote:
Most of the 44 posted "security" advisories are about software bugs with a very low security risk. See for example the posted bug on NASM (http://tigger.uic.edu/~jlongs2/holes/nasm.txt): what's the chance of an evil asm file being sent to an ignorant user that calls nasm to compile this file?
You are right, that this is very low risk.
And this nasm bug is then called a "remotely exploitable security hole".
Obviously it is not. I don't think it is even locally exploitable.
If I mail out a shell script that does "rm -rf $HOME/*", this can also be considered a remotely exploitable security hole.
The difference between nasm executing arbitrary code and a shell script causing a shell to execute "rm -rf $HOME/*" is that the first IS NOT meant to do that, and the second IS meant to do that. So let's not compare those two. Actually while the bug in nasm is very low risk, it is such bugs that make it difficult to build new software using other software as building blocks - you would need to audit and fix nasm before you could use it in an web-to-assembler-gateway :-) regards, Marcin -- Marcin Owsiany <marcin () owsiany pl> http://marcin.owsiany.pl/ GnuPG: 1024D/60F41216 FE67 DA2D 0ACA FC5E 3F75 D6F6 3A0D 8AA0 60F4 1216 "Every program in development at MIT expands until it can read mail." -- Unknown
Current thread:
- DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories Thor Larholm (Dec 16)
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories Crispin Cowan (Dec 17)
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories cees-bart (Dec 17)
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories Marcin Owsiany (Dec 20)
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories security curmudgeon (Dec 17)
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories Julian T J Midgley (Dec 20)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories D. J. Bernstein (Dec 19)
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories Artem Chuprina (Dec 21)
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories Stephen Samuel (Dec 21)
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories D. J. Bernstein (Dec 22)
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories David Eisner (Dec 22)
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories Crispin Cowan (Dec 22)
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories D. J. Bernstein (Dec 23)
- Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories Crispin Cowan (Dec 24)