Russell Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Derek Callaway writes:
>> Curious, what's so insecure about syslog()?
> A version was subject to a buffer overflow attack.
That's just for starters. To be fair, current syslog on *most* Unix
systems is now pretty solid except for occasionally losing messages. But
among the problems I've seen or heard of in different implementations:
* No length checking leading to buffer overflow attacks.
* No filtering of characters leading to odd behavior as various
components not expecting arbitrary binary data get it in messages.
* Poor behavior under load, often dropping messages without an error
(this is still a common problem with syslogd, and is always going to be
a problem with the syslog network protocol since it uses UDP).
The interface also tends to be wildly different across different brands of
Unix if you want to do anything more than call the syslog() function in
libc. And there are several syslog packages (Solaris is notable here)
whose configuration file parsing is so picky and buggy that even people
aware of and expecting the pickiness often have trouble getting it to work
right.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
