Linux systemd Affected by Memory Corruption Vulnerabilities, No Patches Yet (bleepingcomputer.com)

Major Linux distributions are vulnerable to three bugs in systemd, a Linux initialization system and service manager in widespread use, California-based security company Qualys said late yesterday. From a report: The bugs exist in 'journald' service, tasked with collecting and storing log data, and they can be exploited to obtain root privileges on the target machine or to leak information. No patches exist at the moment. Discovered by researchers at Qualys, the flaws are two memory corruption vulnerabilities (stack buffer overflow - CVE-2018-16864, and allocation of memory without limits - CVE-2018-16865) and one out-of-bounds error (CVE-2018-16866). They were able to obtain local root shell on both x86 and x64 machines by exploiting CVE-2018-16865 and CVE-2018-16866. The exploit worked faster on the x86 platform, achieving its purpose in ten minutes; on x64, though, the exploit took 70 minutes to complete. Qualys is planning on publishing the proof-of-concept exploit code in the near future, but they did provide details on how they were able to take advantage of the flaws.

Comments

Pure Poettering inspired incompetence

[nyet]

Looking at the code, all three of these bugs are inexcusable. The systemd devs really are incompetent.

Re:Pure Poettering inspired incompetence

[lgw]

They didn't just copy Microsoft's init system and service manager, they copied Microsoft's attitude towards security and code quality.

Re:Thats what you get for running systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Sums up the mantra of UNIX design. Too bad they didn't follow it.

Re:And Jane face it it's been a while

[mark-t]

It's less about resisting change and more about resisting stupid.

The problem with systemd is that its design is wholly antithetical to the Unix philosophy. It is nothing less than a tragedy for Linux that something like it has become so tightly integrated into as many distros as it has.

"Alexa, start Apache". Smple input to complex code

[raymorris]

Even simpler than a systemd declaration is saying "Alexa, start Apache".

That doesn't mean that Alexa's AI code is simpler than a 20-line bash script. You're comparing the *input* to the systemd code, a config file, vs the actual code that does things in SysVinit.

In sys V, the shell script starts the daemon, it *is* the code. If anything is wrong or you want to change anything, you can look through the shell script and change things. In systemd, the declaration is handed to a binary that does who-knows-what.