Bugtraq mailing list archives

Re: [8lgm]-Advisory-22.UNIX.syslog.2-Aug-1995


From: perry () piermont com (Perry E. Metzger)
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 1995 01:30:07 -0400


Tim Rylance writes:
       We have written an example exploit to overwrite syslog(3)'s
       internal buffer using SunOS sendmail(8).

A quick look at the FreeBSD-current syslog.c and the latest sendmail
source suggests that

 a) turning off mail.debug logging in /etc/syslog.conf will protect you
    (from this particular exploit)

This is a syslog(3) problem, not a syslogd problem, so touching
/etc/syslog.conf would do nothing.

 b) sendmail 8.6.6 and later take care not to log long strings and
    may be safe (from this particular exploit).

I'm not 100% sure of how safe the code is. Given that other daemons
are also potentially unsafe I'm being paranoid and just fixing the
library.

Perry



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