IAm_A_Complete_Idiot

IAm_A_Complete_Idiot, 4 months ago

You can do rollbacks if you’re using something like home-manager on a foreign distribution. It’s just a bit more janky admittedly.

IAm_A_Complete_Idiot, 5 months ago

The solution here generally afaik is to give a specific deadline before you go public. It forces the other party to either patch it, or see the problem happen when they go live. 90 days is the standard timeframe for that since it’s enough time to patch and rollout, but still puts pressure on making it happen.

IAm_A_Complete_Idiot, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

The vulnerability has nothing to do with accidentally logging sensitive information, but crafting a special payload to be logged which gets glibc to write memory it isn’t supposed to write into because it didn’t allocate memory properly. glibc goes too far outside of the scope of its allocation and writes into other memory regions, which an attacked could carefully hand craft to look how they want.

Other languages wouldn’t have this issue because

1. they wouldn’t willy nilly allocate a pointer directly like this, but rather make a safer abstraction type on top (like a C++ vector), and
2. they’d have bounds checking when the compiler can’t prove you can go outside of valid memory regions. (Manually calling .at() in C++, or even better - using a language like rust which makes bounds checks default and unchecked access be opt in with a special method).

Edit: C’s bad security is well known - it’s the primary motivator for introducing rust into the kernel. Google / Microsoft both report 70% of their security vulnerabilities come from C specific issues, curl maintainer talks about how they use different sanitizers and best practices and still run into the same issues, and even ubiquitous and security critical libraries and tools like sudo + polkit suffer from them regularly.