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Remote Root Exploit In lsh
skookum writes "After last week's OpenSSH patch-fest, a lot of people suggested GNU lsh as a replacement. Unfortunately, it seems that the lsh team has recently discovered a heap overflow bug of their own that can lead to compromise. An exploit was posted to BugTraq two days ago. Happy patching."
Why the hell not? Good bridges are the ones that don't fall down
That's not the same as saying that good bridges have no faults. Bridges are built with a large safety factor. A large amount of the steel wire in the Brooklyn Bridge cables is hideously substandard, slipped in there by a currupt subcontractor. But because the safety factors were in place, even though the cables are probably about 5/6 as strong as they were designed to be, because they were designed to be 4 times as strong as strictly necessary, the Brooklyn Bridge is still there today. They paid for a lot more steel than strictly necessary, but they were proved right to have done so.
The bridge is Verifiably Strong Enough, but it certainly isn't Fault-Free. It was a product of defensive engineering, and software containing the inevitable bugs can be made much safer by taking a defensive approach to programming. It's better not to have an out-of-bounds situation at all, but that's no reason not to do bounds-checking wherever an OOB might pose a hazard. Yes it costs money to code all those extra checks, but that's what engineers do in most other disciplines.
TomV