On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 11:54 AM, Merlijn van Deen<[email protected]> wrote: > I would not be too certain about that. For example, buffer overflows are > generally only a security problem when they happen in suid-root programs - > this is why programs designed to be suid root have thorough checks on such > problems. Software designed to be used by root does not always have the > same thoroughness of checks - and running such software via sudo could > expose these errors as security problems.
Any widely-used software with a known buffer overflow gets fixed. This is just as true for shutdown as for ping. You're far *more* likely to find a serious vulnerability in the kernel or services that run as root, just because of their vastly greater LOC. A user who was dedicated enough to try finding a buffer overflow in kill (which is only 16K compiled on nightshade, BTW, and I doubt it's often been changed) could save himself some effort by just waiting for a kernel privilege escalation vulnerability announcement and pulling a zero-day exploit. _______________________________________________ Toolserver-l mailing list ([email protected]) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/toolserver-l Posting guidelines for this list: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette
