Nonsense. This is trivial stuff.

Nonsense. This is trivial stuff.

Posted Jul 18, 2009 16:14 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179)
In reply to: Nonsense. This is trivial stuff. by pflugstad
Parent article: Linux 2.6.30 exploit posted

But the other side of the discussion is that this bug is unexploitable if GCC had not optimized away the null check.

Yes. I wonder what kind of process lead to finding this bug... Looking at the assembler output? Discovering it is very impressive. Brad really deserves a lot of praise.

But still, this is not different than any exploit which relies on knowledge of how a specific compiler works - e.g. how it places variables in the stack, and so on. It is exactly the same thing if you think about it. But nobody would claim that GCC has a bug because it placed the return address in the stack where it could be overwritten.

Brad keeps claiming that the important thing is that on the surface this bug doesn't present as security related. While that is true, nobody can predict how several bugs will interact. In my book any crashing bug is potentially security related until proven otherwise.

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