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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. Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Any word on when they're going to fix the even older "Too many arguments" bug?

    Sorry, but any modern system where a command like "ls a*" may or may not work, based exclusively on the number of files in the directory, is broken.