OSEC

Neohapsis is currently accepting applications for employment. For more information, please visit our website www.neohapsis.com or email hr@neohapsis.com
 
From: Crispin Cowan (crispinwirex.com)
Date: Wed Nov 14 2001 - 12:59:51 CST

  • Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

    David Wagner wrote:

    >If your network daemon has lots of reachable, live code, that tends to
    >be bad for security, I suspect we can all agree. However, I find it
    >hard to see why having lots of dead code should be bad for security.
    >Maybe I'm missing something?
    >
    If your network code has overflowable buffers or format bugs, and you
    are employing non-executable stack (OWL) and heap (PAX) protection, then
    the pile of dead code makes nice targets for "return into libc" style
    attacks.

    Another way of looking at it: in type-unsafe programming languages, no
    code that is in your address space is dead code.

    Crispin 

    -- 
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc. http://wirex.com
Security Hardened Linux Distribution:       http://immunix.org
Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html