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FreeBSD security Advisories: FreeBSD-SA-03:09.sign

Posted by Hemos on from the alert-alert-alert dept.

Dan writes "FreeBSD security team has released two new advisories. The first advisory entitled "Insufficient range checking of signal numbers" could allow a malicious local user to use this vulnerability as a local denial-of-service attack. The second advisory "Kernel memory disclosure via ibcs2" could allow a malicious user to call the iBCS2 version of statfs(2) with an arbitrarily large length parameter, causing the kernel to return a large portion of kernel memory containing sensitive information."

4 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. "Malicious Local User" by Farley+Mullet · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If someone malicious has access to your computer, bad things can happen. It's good to see that the FreeBSD team is tightening things up, but the bottom line is that if someone has an account on a system and they're determined, they'll find a way to do some damage.

    1. Re:"Malicious Local User" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Given all the big changes they've been making to the kernel, I'm not surprised that they're encountering un-dotted i's and uncrossed t's. That's one of the reasons that OpenBSD is the BSD with the fewest new features apart from those related directly to improving security. Theo is fond of saying that new features create new security holes. I wouldn't be too hard on the folks at FreeBSD though. It is -current they're concentrating on, after all.

  2. freebsd-security mailing list by dodell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Subscribe to this list, and you had this story about 12 hours ago. You also downloaded and updated your src tree and fixed the bug in a matter of a few minutes. Why is it that a FreeBSD SA makes it to this site and Linux SAs don't?

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    1. Re:freebsd-security mailing list by zenyu · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Subscribe to this list, and you had this story about 12 hours ago. You also downloaded and updated your src tree and fixed the bug in a matter of a few minutes. Why is it that a FreeBSD SA makes it to this site and Linux SAs don't?

      Prolly cuz the editor and poster were thinking of "only one remote security breach in the default configuration in seven years" OpenBSD. There are local user exploits found all the time in the Linux distros and in the BSDs, when remote vulnerabilities are found in any of them it usually does make it to /.

      But yeah, I usually read about and check my system based on security advisories before it ever makes it to slashdot.. prolly everyone else does as well which explains the 12 hour lag.