Re: [HERT] Advisory #002 Buffer overflow in lsof

From: Friedrichs, Oliver (Oliver_Friedrichsat_private)
Date: Thu Feb 18 1999 - 13:48:22 PST

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    >If lsof is installed setgid kmem, it shouldn't gain any privileges to
    >overwrite something to gain root access.  At worst, it should only be
    >possible to read things in kernel memory that ordinary users shouldn't
    >have access to (I suppose this might include a password in a tty buffer
    >if the cracker got really lucky).
    
    In the past some OS's have had problems whereby even though kmem was
    read-only, you could use mmap() to obtain write access to it.  Although
    this is (hopefully) fixed everywhere now, it would have been a good
    example of how to get instant root with this bug.
    
    see http://www.openbsd.org/advisories/mmap
    
    I would say that read access alone is enough however...
    
    - Oliver
    



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