Posted Jan 17, 2008 14:28 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Wrong name by ms
Parent article: A kernel security hole
It could have been made more obvious, and thus more likely to be rapidly spotted, by making
sure that FMODE_WRITE and MAY_WRITE had different *values* which overlapped with something
quite different in the other flag: but if that had been thought of, this bug would never have
happened because people would have been paying extra attention to it anyway.
Posted Jan 17, 2008 16:17 UTC (Thu) by tbellman (guest, #49983)
[Link]
Except that it wouldn't have helped. The buggy code used FMODE_WRITE to check the bit in the
variable 'flag'; the correct code uses MAY_WRITE to check the bit in the variable 'acc_mode'.
The buggy code did use the correct access mechanisms for the variable it looked at, so no
amount of BDSM type control would have helped.