buffer overflow

Whack-A-Bash: New Vulnerabilities add to Patch Confusion

The good news about the rapid, industry response to the revelations about exploitable security holes in GNU Bash (Bourne Again Shell) (aka “Shellshock”) is that Linux users had a fix in hand almost as soon as they became aware of the problem those patches addressed. The bad news about the quick fixes for the two issues, CVE-2014-6271 and CVE-2014-7169, from the likes of Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian and others is that – in being early- they fail to fix the problems we don’t yet know about. And that’s what we’re seeing in the wake of last week’s storm of patches: a steady drip-drip of disclosures that suggest that Bash may contain other problems worthy of new fixes. Within hours of the disclosure of the first holes, there were problems discovered by Red Hat Product Security researcher Todd Sabin, who found additional “off by one” errors in Bash that were assigned CVE-2014-7186 and CVE-2014-7187 and […]