"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

Re:Apple flaw? No.

[spinja]

The bug I found is not due to the card "complying with a standard", its because the first-generation Airport driver (the latest one available at that), has a bug that allows someone to run code in your kernel from a distance. Maybe I missed the "ieee80211b-pwned" spec, but this doesn't seem like good behavior.

Why is that Apple supporters are in such denial about their favorite products having security flaws? This bug was one of many in the Airport drivers and one an even bigger set of wireless exploits that we plan on releasing. A Broadcom bug was released today which likely affects more systems than Apple has ever shipped.

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.