full-disclosure - Re: GUNINSKI THE SELF-PROMOTER

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Message-ID: <1058365626.21924.2268.camel@tesuji.nac.uci.edu>
From: strombrg at dcs.nac.uci.edu (Dan Stromberg)
Subject: Re: GUNINSKI THE SELF-PROMOTER

On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 07:26, Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Jul 2003 08:02:56 EDT, "Richard M. Smith" <rms@...puterbytesman.com>  said:
> > Ah yes, the Good Time virus.  What a silly idea that a virus can execute
> > simply by reading an email message.  Everyone knows that's
> > impossible........
> 
> Actually, that's *STILL* impossible.

No, that used to be a popular misconception.  It's always been
theoretically possible for a plaintext mailreader to allow, EG, a buffer
overflow.  It's harder to get it wrong with a simpler mailreader, but
far from impossible.

Imagine reading mail text into a big buffer, and then strcpy'ing pieces
out of that buffer into an array of fixed length buffers (maybe one
buffer per mail message or per line), one of which gets overflowed. 
Sure, it's a bad thing to do.  But that doesn't make it impossible.

-- 
Dan Stromberg DCS/NACS/UCI <strombrg@....nac.uci.edu>

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