On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 at 01:16:44PM +0100, cees-bart wrote: > Most of the 44 posted "security" advisories are about software bugs with > a very low security risk. See for example the posted bug on NASM > (http://tigger.uic.edu/~jlongs2/holes/nasm.txt): what's the chance of an > evil asm file being sent to an ignorant user that calls nasm to compile > this file? You are right, that this is very low risk. > And this nasm bug is then called a "remotely exploitable > security hole". Obviously it is not. I don't think it is even locally exploitable. > If I mail out a shell script that does "rm -rf $HOME/*", > this can also be considered a remotely exploitable security hole. The difference between nasm executing arbitrary code and a shell script causing a shell to execute "rm -rf $HOME/*" is that the first IS NOT meant to do that, and the second IS meant to do that. So let's not compare those two. Actually while the bug in nasm is very low risk, it is such bugs that make it difficult to build new software using other software as building blocks - you would need to audit and fix nasm before you could use it in an web-to-assembler-gateway :-) regards, Marcin -- Marcin Owsiany <marcin@xxxxxxxxxx> http://marcin.owsiany.pl/ GnuPG: 1024D/60F41216 FE67 DA2D 0ACA FC5E 3F75 D6F6 3A0D 8AA0 60F4 1216 "Every program in development at MIT expands until it can read mail." -- Unknown
