NULL Pointer Exploit Excites Researchers 327
Da Massive writes "Mark Dowd's paper "Application-Specific Attacks: Leveraging the ActionScript Virtual Machine" has alarmed researchers. It points out techniques that promise to open up a class of exploits and vulnerability research previously thought to be prohibitively difficult. Already, the small but growing group of Information Security experts who have had the chance to read and digest the contents of the paper are expressing an excited concern depending on how they are interpreting it. While the Flash vulnerability described in the paper[PDF] has been patched by Adobe, the presentation of a reliable exploit for NULL pointer dereferencing has the researchers who have read the paper fascinated. Thomas Ptacek has an explanation of Dowd's work, and Nathan McFeters at ZDNet is 'stunned by the technical details.'"
Aha! (Score:5, Funny)
Oblig (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The crux of the exploit: (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but if your pointer is NULL (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Is this new? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:boring? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:fubar (Score:4, Funny)
If your pointer is NULL (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Always check your return values! (Score:2, Funny)
The only way I've seen to get it to consistently fail is not on low memory but by asking for ludicrous amounts like 4GB at once on a 32bit system. Try it - get your system into a low memory condition and execute a few mallocs.. they don't fail - the OS merely continues to increase virtual memory and swap more and more.
"A modern OS" will most likely have fixed-size swap partitions.
Re:The crux of the exploit: (Score:3, Funny)
What's ironic.. (Score:5, Funny)
A browser crash is what's SUPPOSED to happen here to prevent the exploit from deploying its payload. I mean, in this case, a crash is the DESIRED behavior. An uncaught exception should be thrown.
So... just walk with me here... maybe Windows isn't just unreliable and unstable. MAYBE it's the most secure application stack ever devised.
Re:The crux of the exploit: (Score:3, Funny)
If you are coding in C, you won't be in control of the machine for long.
Re:fubar (Score:3, Funny)