Slashdot Mirror
Exploit For Crashing Minecraft Servers Made Public
An anonymous reader writes "After nearly two years of waiting for Mojang to fix a security vulnerability that can be used to crash Minecraft servers, programmer Ammar Askar has released a proof of concept exploit for the flaw in the hopes that this will force them to do something about it. "Mojang is no longer a small indie company making a little indie game, their software is used by thousands of servers, hundreds of thousands people play on servers running their software at any given time. They have a responsibility to fix and properly work out problems like this," he noted." Here is Askar's own post on the exploit, and his frustration with the response he's gotten to disclosing it to the developers.
From TFA:
Update: With the release of this full disclosure I have actually made contact with mojang and they are working to fix the issue. Apparently the initial fix they tried failed which indicates a lack of proper testing.
Update 2: The exact problem that caused this bug to go unpatched has been identified. Mojang attempted to implement a fix for this problem, however they did not test their fix against the proof of concept I provided, which still crashed the server perfectly fine. This, in combination with ignoring me when I asked for status updates twice led me to believe that Mojang had attempted no fix. In retrospect, a final warning before this full disclosure more recently was propbably in order. A combination of mis-communication and lack of testing led to this situation today, hopefully it can be a good learning experience.
Update 3: This problem has been patched as of minecraft version 1.8.4
https://mojang.com/2015/04/minecraft-1-8-4-security-release/
I’m happy to see that multiple other security issues have also been fixed. Once again, I feel better communication would have easily alleviated this problem. Keeping me in the loop and not ignoring me, in addition to proper testing would have easily led to this exploit being fixed long ago.
As usual, by the time news hits slashdot, it's not really news anymore. RIP Martin Lawrence.
Maybe people will stop playing this waste of bandwidth.
If you can think of a better program with which to spend three hours digging then I'd like to hear it.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Modders move quite slow due to the frustrating architecture. 1.6 required a major overhaul to most mods, and 1.8 is being avoided like the plague for the same reason. There's also little incentive to upgrade, since the amount of content in the mods is orders of magnitude higher than vanilla, no ones going to switch off 60 mods in a modpack to get some horses and a biome.
YOU don't like Minecraft?
Why didn't anyone tell me!??!?!?!
Now that I know that YOU don't like it I will stop playing it and make my kids stop playing it!
I had NO idea it had been judged unworthy by YOU.
I am so sorry. Obviously NO ONE should play a game YOU don't like.
Clearly we both need to be back on our meds.
Yes, but it took two whole years before the fix came out. And the fix was made within a day of the exploit being released.
Yes, I can understand 90 days being a bit tight if you're talking fundamental software like operating systems (which require a lot of testing, staging, and you lose some to Patch Tuesday), especially since root causing and fixing can require a bit of time. But two years is a bit on the long side.
More like the guy got ignored and once he released the code, the "OH SH*T" came out.
This is one of those struggles between what's right and what's reasonable... 90 days is a bit quick for something big like an operating system where a change can break everything, but it's also on the long side for something that only breaks something really minor, like Minecraft.
it's also on the long side for something that only breaks something really minor, like Minecraft.
I invite you to spend 5 minutes alone with my 8 year old son at a time when he can't get Minecraft to work. Then tell me if you still think it's minor.
They can't really say they "weren't aware" when the original bug submitter's proof of concept exploit (that was provided to them) was not fixed by the "patch". That is at best extremely lazy testing.
I once coded for a game, Eternal Lands, where I discovered a major security bug. The game had a feature where if a person said a URL, it would turn into a clickable link. This was opened via a popen call. No input sanitization. Aka, vulnerable to injection. A person who simply speaks a malicious URL and makes it look like something interesting to click (hiding the insertion command in the path) could run it on anyone's computer who clicks to open the link.
Big problem. Simple fix. But try as I might, I couldn't get them to let me fix it. They were fine with me writing a whole new special effects graphics system for them, but one simple input sanitization, noooo, the popen works, let's not mess with it and possibly "introduce a bug"! Eventually it took me writing a sample command on the forum that would make a file in the user's home directory (which anyone who knows anything about unix commands could make far more malicious) by clicking on the URL. Suddenly they let me patch the system immediately (and deleted the forum thread... I don't blame them).
I didn't want to have to resort to that. But I didn't want a potentially dangerous exploit sitting in the system.
I never got approval to fix all of the other potential exploits in their system. Their networking protocol was terrible. I only ever saw the client code, but there was literally zero authentication that the server was who they said they were and that packets weren't malformed. Their entire security model was "let's initiate a TCP connection to a hard-coded IP and unconditionally trust everything that we receive". I can't imagine what their server code is like. But they wouldn't even let me add in trivial bounds checking to make sure that the packets weren't oversized - the most minimal of sanity checking.
The fear of changes breaking stuff often leads developers to neglect security. Changes to improve gameplay or graphics? Of course, our users will love it! Changes to the protocol? Nonono, the protocol is working, why risk breaking it?
The short of it? Don't have too much faith that that MMORPG you're playing isn't hackable in a way that could be nasty to your system.
*Kid Rock runs for Senate* Democrats: We must run Kid Scissors.