Magnitude of glibc Vulnerability Coming To Light (threatpost.com)

msm1267 writes: The glibc vulnerability disclosed this week has some experts on edge because of how DNS can leveraged in exploits. Dan Kaminsky said that while man-in-the-middle attacks are one vector, it would appear that it's also possible to exploit the bug and attack most Linux servers via DNS caching-only servers. 'This would be substantially worse if it went through the caching ecosystem; 99 percent of attack vectors go through that system,' Kaminsky said. Glibc, or the GNU C library, is used by most flavors of Linux and also a number of popular web services and frameworks, giving attacks potentially massive horizontal scale. The major Linux distros have patched and pushed updates to servers; source code is also available for homegrown Linux builds.

Comments

strlcpy() isn't good enough for glibc.

[emil]

No, it "only leads to other errors".

Funny, I haven't heard of any showstopper bugs in OpenBSD libc - not this year, not ever. And it's ubiquitous, since I'm running it on my phone.

This bug, after ghost, would be a good opportunity to take a step back for a serious assessment of what must be removed for a secure system.