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Re: Backport of the integer overflow in the brk system call



On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 11:17:19AM +1100, Russell Coker wrote:

> Of course someone could look at the MS fixes and do some decompilation for a 
> similar result.  Sure it would be more difficult to analyse the assembler 
> code produced from decompilation than to analyse C source, but OTOH there is 
> no possibility for other people to try to fix bugs either.

The point being that you can't get a prerelease MS fix, so by the time MS
has released it, the general population has no excuse for not applying it,
so decompilation of should be more pointless (I know in reality no one
applies MS fixes in a timely fashion, so there is still an shrinking window
of opportunity).

The only way to have avoided this kernel vulnerability from day-0 of
discovery/fix release would have been to be constantly upgrading to
pre-release kernels.

I'm starting to sound like I'm trolling for closed-source development models
or something, which is not the case, I'm just concerned by the security
implications of what I've been talking about re the window of time between a
believed to be harmless bug fix release in a pre-release kernel and the
release of the next stable version that incorporates that fix.

Andrew



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