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AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Basic ASLR was not implemented in 3 major antivirus makers, allowing attackers to use the antivirus itself towards attacking Windows PCs. The bug, in layman terms, is: the antivirus would select the same memory address space every time it would run. If attackers found out the memory space's address, they could tell their malicious code to execute in the same space, at the same time, and have it execute with root privileges, which most antivirus have on Windows PCs. It's a basic requirement these days for software programmers to use ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to prevent their code from executing in predictable locations. Affected products: AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky. All "quietly" issued fixes.
Windows users can download EMET to do this.
It's from MS and it's free. It lets you force a bunch of shit (like ASLR), lets you set up certificate pinning for websites (trust only certain certs or block specific certs), etc.
https://technet.microsoft.com/...
Which is besides the point. They are basically saying: All that is required to exploit this "weakness" is to already have compromised the system to the degree that you can write to another processes code space! It is another nothing to see here, move along" article, where the person writing it doesn't understand how computers work.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Correct. Determinable address space is not a security problem in itself - it requires other security problems to be exploitable. And figuring out what the address space is in real-time is not that hard either; it just makes it harder. It's automated security through obscurity.
In some cases, it is preferable to make it sligtly easier for intruders who are already inside the system, in order to reap the benefits. Programs like "rebase" for Windows and "prelink" for Linux can preload a known address table into executables ahead of time, making them start faster and use less memory, because reallocation does not have to occur at load time.
Especially in an embedded world, that can make a boatload of difference.
Some look for silver bullets and want to impose ASLR (no, not the cameras) and https everywhere, whether needed or not, without considering the price of doing so. TANSTAAFL, and no silver bullets. They all come at a price, and sometimes the price is not right.
Fix the other security problems, and ASLR gives no added value, only drawbacks. But on a badly maintained system running software of dubious security value, sure, it can be a good addition. But make no mistake - it doesn't plug any holes, it just makes existing holes harder to exploit. At a cost.