- cross-posted to:
- security@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- security@lemmy.ml
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For your convenience:
The researchers pointed out that the vulnerability cannot be exploited remotely. An attacker can trigger the issue by providing crafted inputs to applications that employ these [syslog] logging functions [in apps that allow the user to feed crafted data to those functions].
This is a privilege escalation.
Security-critical C and memory safety bugs. Name a more iconic duo...
I'd have kinda preferred for public disclosure to have happened after the fix propagated to distros. Now we get to hurry the patch to end-users which isn't always easily possible. Could we at least have a coordinated disclosure time each month? That'd be great.
Public disclosure is typically done 90 days after Deva are privately notified. That should be enough time for security-critical bugs.
They did follow that. You can read their disclosure timeline in their report.
Problem is that the devs of glibc aren't the only people interested in getting glibc patched but us distro maintainers too.
What I would have preferred would be an early private disclosure to the upstream maintainers and then a public but intentionally unspecific disclosure with just the severity to give us distro people some time to prepare a swift rollout when the full disclosure happens and the patch becomes public.
Alternatively, what would be even better would have been to actually ship the patch in a release but not disclose its severity (or even try to hide it by making it seem like a refactor or non-security relevant bugfix) until a week or two later; ensuring that any half-decent distro release process and user upgrade cycle will have the patch before its severity is disclosed. That's how the Linux kernel does it AFAIK and it's the most reasonable approach I've seen.
glibc is great, but holy shit the source code is obscured into oblivion, so hard to understand, with hardcoded optimizations, and compiler optimizations. I understand how difficult is to find vulnerabilities. A bit sad that the only C lib truely free software is so hard to actually read its code or even contribute to it.
For what it's worth, glibc is very much performance-critical, so this shouldn't be a surprise. Any possible optimization is worth it.
There are a ton of free software libc implementations outside of glibc. I think most implementations of libc are free software at this point. There's Bionic, the BSD libcs, musl, the Haiku libc, the OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana libc, Newlib, relibc, the ToaruOS libc, the SerenityOS libc and a bunch more. Pretty sure Wine/ReactOS also have free implementations of the Windows libc.
Imagine all the vulnerabilities that privative and low reviewed code has...
