full-disclosure - Re: Publishing exploit code

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Date: Fri Jul  1 12:00:24 2005
From: cjs at cynic.net (Curt Sampson)
Subject: Re: Publishing exploit code - what is it good for

Interesting, becuase this just hit me the other day.

Wearing my sysadmin hat, I woke up one morning to find that the NetBSD
package converters/xlreader had a vulnerability. Nobody seemed to have
a patch for it, but looking at it, even with my rather limited level of
C coding skill, I reckoned I could fix it. (Standard buffer overflow:
replace sprintf with snprintf kinda thing.) So I did.

Or at least, I think I did. I can't get my hands on a working exploit,
so I don't feel truly comfortable that I did indeed fix the problem. Maybe
to someone more familiar with C it would be proved fixed by inspection,
but I don't feel that comfortable with it myself.

I didn't really used to think that exploits were so useful until this.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@...ic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.NetBSD.org
      Make up enjoying your city life...produced by BIC CAMERA