Re: core dump

[ljb () OBSIDIAN CO ZA (Leon Breedt)]

mount ararat blossom (mount_ararat_blossom () HOTMAIL COM) spake thusly:

> my question is that i am new into the topic of vulnerability development
> world and i really wonder why unix like OS dumps core files and what is the
> importance
> of it.
A core dump is a memory image of an application. When the application performs
illegal memory accesses, it gets sent a SIGSEGV signal, aborts, and leaves a
core file in its working directory (if you have enabled this feature with
ulimit). This is useful for debugging a program, but can represent a security
hole if the program had any kind of cleartext passwords in memory at the time
the error occurred.

If a program does this, its usually a case of programmer error (off-by-one,
insufficient error checking, non-robust code).

Regards,

Leon.

--
< Leon Breedt                   : ljb () debian org           >
< Developer, Obsidian Systems   : http://obsidian.co.za    >