Re: [Full-Disclosure] [SECURITY] [DSA-403-1] userland can access Linux kernel memory

[Roman Drahtmueller <draht@suse.de>]

Hello Florian,

> 
> > Recently multiple servers of the Debian project were compromised using a
> > Debian developers account and an unknown root exploit. Forensics
> > revealed a burneye encrypted exploit. Robert van der Meulen managed to
> > decrypt the binary which revealed a kernel exploit. Study of the exploit
> > by the RedHat and SuSE kernel and security teams quickly revealed that
> > the exploit used an integer overflow in the brk system call. Using
> > this bug it is possible for a userland program to trick the kernel into
> > giving access to the full kernel address space. This problem was found
> > in September by Andrew Morton, but unfortunately that was too late for
> > the 2.4.22 kernel release.
> 
> Does this mean that the vendor-sec concept has failed, or that there is
> a leak on that list?  Or is this just an issue which is very specific to
> Linux and its maintainer situation?
> 

The fact that security-relevant bugs get found and fixed in an open,
transparent and traceable way may be specific to Linux, yes. 

Vendor-sec contributes to this, and it has not failed in doing so. The
debian announcement only says that by the time that this bug was
discovered, it was too late already for the 2.4.22 kernel release.

> _______________________________________________
> Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.

Thanks,
Roman.
-- 
 -                                                                   -
| Roman Drahtmüller      <draht@suse.de> //      Nail here            |
  SUSE Linux AG - Security       Phone: //       for a new            
| Nürnberg, Germany     +49-911-740530 //        monitor!     --> [x] |
 -                                                                   -

_______________________________________________
Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html