"Month of Kernel Bugs" Project Head Interviewed

An anonymous reader writes "November has been labelled the 'Month of Kernel Bugs' in security circles. The Month of Kernel Bugs began on November 1, with the publication of a vulnerability in Apple's AirPort drivers. SecuriTeam blogs did an interview with LMH, who hosts the project."

Comments

A question I wish was answered

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Who is LMH?

Apple vs Broadcom

[Kadin2048]

I'm not sure this is true. I don't think vulnerability was in all wireless drivers; that would just be too weird. There are hundreds of different WL chipsets and driver stacks; not all of them are written that crappily. A good many may be, but not all.

There was apparently a problem in Apple's drivers, as well as in a lot of other closed-source drivers. In fact, when those two guys did the "Hack a MacBook's Wireless in 30 Seconds" demo (of which I am a bit ashamed to admit I submitted the /. article for), they weren't even using Apple's wireless card or drivers, they were using a third-party one, and then just implicated Apple later.

If you read a few posts up in the thread you'll see that they have now found a pretty big hole in Broadcom's (assumedly Windows) drivers for wireless cards, where transmitting a specifically crafted SSID can result in kernel-mode code execution.

I think Apple got hit because it was a big target; since Microsoft doesn't specifically (to my knowledge) make WL drivers, and Apple being bigger than any single third-party WL-card vendor, when people found a vulnerability affecting many drivers and chipsets, they went for the one that would get them the most press coverage. While I can't condone this (since I think it involves fear-mongering and pandering to the knee-jerk Apple-haters), it's not hard to understand.