this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024

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Root access vulnerability in glibc library impacts many Linux distros (securityaffairs.com)

submitted 2 years ago by joojmachine@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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[–] shadowintheday2@lemmy.world 95 points 2 years ago (11 children)

"A qsort vulnerability is due to a missing bounds check and can lead to memory corruption. It has been present in all versions of glibc since 1992. "

This one amazes me. Imagine how many vulnerabilities future researchers will discover in ancient software that persisted/persist for decades.

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[–] PlexSheep@feddit.de 67 points 2 years ago* (7 children)

That's not the main part of the article, just a footnote, for anyone wondering.

The flaw resides in the glibc’s syslog function, an attacker can exploit the flaw to gain root access through a privilege escalation.

The vulnerability was introduced in glibc 2.37 in August 2022.

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[–] i18nde@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

So, it must be with the BSDs too?

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[+] Rustmilian@lemmy.world 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

[deleted]

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[–] PlexSheep@feddit.de 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

Iirc bad does not use glibc, but I'm not very involved with BSD.

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[+] Tja@programming.dev 4 points 2 years ago

[removed by mod]

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[–] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch -2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Wait, why has a compiler system log functionlity?

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[–] StefanT@lemmy.world 22 points 2 years ago

glibc is a library, gcc is the compiler.

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[–] PlexSheep@feddit.de 5 points 2 years ago

You are probably confusing the glibc with gcc and g++. Glibc is an implementation of the C standard library, made by GNU (thats where the g in the name comes from).

If you were to look into it, it uses the syscalls to tell the underlying computer system what to do when you call functions, such as printf.

If you want to read more, see here

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[–] xlash123@sh.itjust.works 35 points 2 years ago

C is just crazy. You accidentally forget to put the bounds in a sorting function, and now you are root.

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[–] kaputt@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

According to the link in the article, the qsort() bug can only be triggered with a non-transitive cmp() function. Would such a cmp function ever be useful?

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[–] Giooschi@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

You don't necessarily have to write a non-transitive cmp() function willingly, it may happen that you write one without realizing due to some edge cases where it's not transitive.

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