New Linux Kernel Crash-Exploit discovered

Ant writes " According to linuxreviews article's on 6/11/2004, there is a nasty bug that lets a simple C program crash the kernel (2.4.18-2.6.x reported so far), effectively locking the whole system. Affects both 2.4.2x and 2.6.x kernels on the x86 architecture. This exploit can be compiled and run without a root access and with a shell access. There are detailed information and source code mentioned. " You need to have shell access to run this program; it's also worth noting that not *all* flavors are vulnerable. Please read article for the full details.

Comments

Re:This is another reason why C should be deprecat

[DaHat]

You think that Fortran, Cobol and Perl have been retired?

By any chance would you or anyone you know have a Citibank credit card? A fact you may not be aware of that most of Citibank's back end is written in Cobol. Federated Insurance is another organization that has plenty of Cobol based systems and when last I checked, neither company has any plan to change it.

Yes, there are newer and possibly 'better' language out there, does that make them better in all such cases? Hell no.

When speaking with a Federated representative she proudly said that their database backend system was completely Cobol based and was faster and more efficient then anything else on the market. It too me a little while to realize that she wasn't saying that it could process a days worth of transactions faster than anything else on the market with newer hardware, the issue was the cost of upgrading.

If you have millions of lines of code in an older language and a database system that has been in place for 20+ years... it's not easy to upgrade no matter the advantages. If you worked for such a large company, it'd be pretty easy to sell something new, but do you want to guarantee a seamless transition from one system to another? Any hiccups along the way will most likely make the transition be regretted.

Same goes for C. Yes, Java and other languages might be able to do a better job, the fact is that huge amounts of legacy code exists and needs to be supported.

Example: Linux. Written in C primarily if I am not mistaken. How should it be fixed? Should it be ported to C++? VB? Java? C#? Such a conversion *may* be possible, however even if it were, the potential benefits to be realized are so inconsequential compared to the cost of doing so to make such an endeavor be wasted.

Visual Basic that lacks such archaic coding styles, one will also note a serious speed increase over C.

I'd suggest you do some research on that point. Raw C/C++ tends to be a hell of a lot faster than VB. Yes, you can often create a front end in VB much faster than you can in C. I would remind you though that in C/C++ you can create far more dynamic and elegant code for your task. In fact, the advantage of C++ over VB I think can be summed up in a single word: Inheritance.

As a programmer who spends about 1/4th of his time working in embedded systems (not the niceties of XP embedded mind you, but micro controllers and other such horrors), I can tell you that VB has no place in such a world.

Hell, I'd love to see an 8051 VB compiler, just to for a laugh.

Re:Windows is obviously superior

[nahdude812]

In Soviet Windows, OS crashes YOU!