Re: resend

From: Casper Dik (casperat_private)
Date: Fri Aug 07 1998 - 12:37:21 PDT

  • Next message: Ben Sapp: "Re: irix-6.2 "at -f" vulnerability"

    >No one worried much about stack-smashing in those days.  It would have
    >been a difficult attack, though, since the stack grew up, and local
    >variables would have been allocated after the save area.  (While the
    >current routine's save area didn't have the actual return address, by
    >convention it had a back-pointer to the previous save area at a fixed
    >offset from the start of the area.  The attack would have involved
    >creating a bogus save area with register 14 pointing to the new code,
    >then smashing the back pointer in the current save area.)
    
    
    I don't think stacks growing upward help; remember that most exploits
    in C involve on eof the unbounded copy routines and that those
    overwrite the invocation record of the function calling sprintf/str* etc.
    (Or one level deeper as on SPARC).
    
    When the stack grows up, sprintf/str* will overwrite their own invocation
    record/return address.  So it's actually easier as there's no code executed
    between the return from str*/sprintf , instead those function return
    directly to the exploit code.
    
    Casper
    



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 14:11:44 PDT