oss-sec mailing list archives
Re: strings / libbfd crasher
From: Tavis Ormandy <taviso () cmpxchg8b com>
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 16:56:11 -0700
On 24 October 2014 13:31, Michal Zalewski <lcamtuf () coredump cx> wrote:
[+Tavis]I don't understand the user benefit of extracting strings only from certain sections of executables, and I almost feel like it's a side effect of strings being a part of binutils more than anything else.I fully agree. I wasn't aware strings does any kind of executable parsing and I was very surprised that there is any attack vector at all against it at all.Tavis mentioned to me some time ago that he made that suggestion upstream when he bumped into other issues many years ago; he can probably comment on how that went, but more generally, distro vendors have some latitude to apply non-upstream patches to change the default behavior... maybe that's the way to go. /mz
Yeah, `strings -a` is closer to what people expect by default - most people find the section parsing a surprise. I found this one 10 years ago https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91398, and suggested at the time that maybe `strings -a` should be the default mode, enabling bfd parsing only when requested. This was dismissed by upstream, but I still think it's a good idea... Tavis. -- ------------------------------------- taviso () cmpxchg8b com | pgp encrypted mail preferred -------------------------------------------------------
Current thread:
- strings / libbfd crasher Hanno Böck (Oct 23)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher Michal Zalewski (Oct 23)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher Dave Rutherford (Oct 23)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher mancha (Oct 23)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher mancha (Oct 24)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher Hanno Böck (Oct 24)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher Michal Zalewski (Oct 24)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher Michal Zalewski (Oct 24)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher Hanno Böck (Oct 24)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher Michal Zalewski (Oct 24)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher Tavis Ormandy (Oct 24)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher mancha (Oct 24)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher Michal Zalewski (Oct 23)
- Re: Re: strings / libbfd crasher Hanno Böck (Oct 26)
- Re: strings / libbfd crasher cve-assign (Oct 30)
- Re: Re: strings / libbfd crasher Alexander Cherepanov (Nov 02)
- Re: Re: strings / libbfd crasher Hanno Böck (Nov 02)
- Re: Re: strings / libbfd crasher Michal Zalewski (Nov 02)
- Re: Re: strings / libbfd crasher Jann Horn (Nov 02)
- Re: Re: strings / libbfd crasher Alexander Cherepanov (Nov 04)
- Re: Re: strings / libbfd crasher Michal Zalewski (Nov 04)