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33-Year-Old Unix Bug Fixed In OpenBSD

Posted by kdawson on from the yet-another-stack-overflow dept.

Ste sends along the cheery little story of Otto Moerbeek, one of the OpenBSD developers, who recently found and fixed a 33-year-old buffer overflow bug in Yacc. "But if the stack is at maximum size, this will overflow if an entry on the stack is larger than the 16 bytes leeway my malloc allows. In the case of of C++ it is 24 bytes, so a SEGV occurred. Funny thing is that I traced this back to Sixth Edition UNIX, released in 1975."

1 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Other Unixes by X0563511 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes. But OpenBSD fixed it, so they get credit for the fix. It's up to the maintainers of the other unix(ish) versions to implement the fix.

    --
    For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...