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Homeland Security Uncovers Critical Flaw in X11

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the nice-catch dept.

Amy's Robot writes "An open-source security audit program funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has flagged a critical vulnerability in the X Window System (X11) which is used in Unix and Linux systems. A missing parentheses in a bit of code is to blame. The error can grant a user root access, and was discovered using an automated code-scanning tool." While serious, the flaw has already been corrected.

2 of 517 comments (clear)

  1. False Alarm by dfn5 · · Score: 1, Troll
    After Homeland Security discovered "xhost -" they issued this press release "Sorry, my bad".

    --
    -- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
  2. Re:Missing *pair* of parentheses by Edmund+Blackadder · · Score: 1, Troll

    This helps illustrate the biggest problem I have with C (and most other modern languages). And that is that is that you can close your eyes, start banging on the keyboard and type in some random sequence of characters and it is very likely that it will get parsed and compiled and result in some kind of random program.

    In other words, because there are so much abbreviations in C, any mistake usually results in syntaticaly valid but otherwise erroneous code.

    Brevity is not the end all. A more verbose language (like Pascal) can be much more helpful by catching your typos before compiling.