Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1998 21:47:19 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Paul Hart <hart@iserver.com>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: security@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The 99,999-bug question: Why can you execute from the stack? Message-ID: <v04011704b1d9a14fc0d0@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.96.980720142915.6556A-100000@anchovy.orem.iserver.com> References: <199807201732.LAA20377@lariat.lariat.org>
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At 2:57 PM -0600 7/20/98, Paul Hart wrote: >On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, Brett Glass wrote: > >> I would argue that the real problem is unsafe tools. C and its libraries >> have, from the start, been rusty, and unsafe, with no safeguards against >> cutting one's head off. > > Often times "being careful" just means rethinking your C coding style. > Instead of using strcpy(), use strncpy(). That's not too hard of change, > is it? As a simple example, your entire qpopper problem would have been > non-existent if the programmer would have used vsnprintf() instead of > vsprintf(). Funny what a difference a single character makes. It is not a hard change. That, however, is no consolation to anyone nailed by this. The fact is that QPOPPER did use vsprintf, and that (apparently) no one noticed it. It wasn't *Brett's* coding style that will cause *Brett* to lose a few weeks of time here. Perhaps we could think up some changes which would make these bad coding decisions much more obvious. And if we do that, then maybe we catch more of them before getting bitten by them, instead of after the fact. I don't mean to be inflammatory here, I just wonder if there's some changes which could be made which would safe "future Brett's" from losing a large chunk of time. --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe security" in the body of the message
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