Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory
From: Roman Drahtmueller <draht () suse de>
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 08:51:43 +0100 (MET)
Hello Florian,
Recently multiple servers of the Debian project were compromised using a Debian developers account and an unknown root exploit. Forensics revealed a burneye encrypted exploit. Robert van der Meulen managed to decrypt the binary which revealed a kernel exploit. Study of the exploit by the RedHat and SuSE kernel and security teams quickly revealed that the exploit used an integer overflow in the brk system call. Using this bug it is possible for a userland program to trick the kernel into giving access to the full kernel address space. This problem was found in September by Andrew Morton, but unfortunately that was too late for the 2.4.22 kernel release.Does this mean that the vendor-sec concept has failed, or that there is a leak on that list? Or is this just an issue which is very specific to Linux and its maintainer situation?
The fact that security-relevant bugs get found and fixed in an open, transparent and traceable way may be specific to Linux, yes. Vendor-sec contributes to this, and it has not failed in doing so. The debian announcement only says that by the time that this bug was discovered, it was too late already for the 2.4.22 kernel release.
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Current thread:
- [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory debian-security-announce (Dec 01)
- Re: [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory Florian Weimer (Dec 01)
- Re: [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory Roman Drahtmueller (Dec 02)
- Re: [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory Florian Weimer (Dec 02)
- Re: [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory Paul Starzetz (Dec 02)
- Re: [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory Roman Drahtmueller (Dec 02)
- Re: [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory Cedric Blancher (Dec 02)
- Re: [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory Wojciech Purczynski (Dec 02)
- Re: [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory Florian Weimer (Dec 02)
- Re: [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory Florian Weimer (Dec 01)