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FreeBSD Kernel Leak
Pine Digital Security announced a FreeBSD kernel leak, found when auditing a customer. The leak can be exploited to panic the server or elevate privileges. FreeBSD swiftly updated CVS, a security advisory will probably follow. Both the -RELEASE branch and -CURRENT branch are vulnerable.
"FreeBSD swiftly updated CVS"
I love open-source.
Its a FreeBSD kernel bug, NetBSD and openBSD use different kernels than FreeBSD.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Where in the story posting does it say that involves NetBSD and/or OpenBSD? It states clearly that it's a FreeBSD bug. And one that's already fixed in CVS to boot.
Read the advisory. The bug was fixed first, and then the advisory was released. Also, this security related issue isn't easy to exploit. Calling that syscall 2^31 times certainly takes a while :)
Let me just remind you all that this bug does NOT effect the OS/2 Warp 3.0 kernel.
I repeat, the OS/2 Warp kernel is not effected!
i appreciate postings like this, but as usual, any good discussion about the problem is zero on slashdot.
every time there is a mention of linux or xBSD or whatever OS having a problem, people who don't use it come out of the woodwork to say "LOOK! It sucks! It's broken! HaHaHa! We Win!".
how old are you people ? (mentally?)
no wonder why other tech-based sites have no respect for slashdot discussions.
Why would this be a big blow? It was a big problem when the latest OpenSSH bug came along. Or when Sun had a problem with NIS (I administrate multiple platforms and around 50 servers by now). It is just another security problem and in a few months we will see another one. Who cares what platforms it is. You compile, install and go on with your life.
Why was this even posted? First Slashdot posts erroneous stories. Then they start making up stories. Now they post the most trivial of stories.
"Ho hum. Another slow news day. Let's roll some dice and post a minor random security advisory from some random project and pretend it's news."
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
This is a local vulnerability; it doesn't, in and of itself, make servers vulnerable. Even if someone has a local account on a system, it takes hours of CPU time to perform an exploit.
It looks like the bug (and the fix) were already announced (and committed to CVS) but that the possibility of using the bug in an exploit was not revealed until now (and might not even have been appreciated by the original reporter).
if I use FreeBSD then I will be hacked.
Not exactly a reprasentative poll but...
I use FreeBSD. I work in an office with 7 other people who all use RedHat. Out of the 8 of us, over the past 2 years, I'm the only one never to have been hacked.
The job I had before this was with an ISP which used FreeBSD for all their core systems. And in their whole history they had only ever had one FreeBSD system hacked, and that turned out to be an ex-employee who had added his public key to someobody elses authorized_keys file.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
I have a FreeBSD machine over at Rackspace, and I found out the hard way what they meant. They only support out-of-the-box distributions. So if you cvsup the source and then rebuild your world and kernel, then if anything goes wrong with the system (say, for instance, a disk fries) they won't perform support operations as part of your built-in service fees (since you're not running on a standard configuration). Instead, you'll have to pay a premium for the support.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
The less cynical interpretation is that they don't have the support smarts to support FBSD.
The cynic in me suggests they have a deal with Red Hat.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
The problem isn't calling just calling fpathconf() repetitively. The problem is calling fpathconf() repetitively on a socket or other non-file (which would be a bug in itself). And by "repetitively" I mean at least 2,147,483,648 times on the same file descriptor for a system panic exploit, and exactly 4,294,967,295 times on the same file descriptor (followed by a close()) for the priviledge escalation exploit.
No network daemon that is part of the FreeBSD base system can be coerced into performing the necessary actions. Grep the source tree yourself (you'll only get a handful of hits) and examine the resulting files if you don't believe me. It's impossible to rule out everything in the ports collection (and the FreeBSD folks are careful not to make any claims regarding them) but it's hard to imagine creating an exploit of greater than theoretical importance using any network server.