“The hottest trend these days in network intrusion is to
exploit buffer overruns, a technique where-by you feed a
program more data than it has allocated, overwriting the memory in
the hope of making the program do something it would normally never
do. It’s an interesting technique but just one of many available in
the arsenal of today’s intruders. In the interest of feeding
the media blitz about Internet security, this month’s column
features a walk through some of the more innovative and interesting
security holes that we’ve come across in the past few
years.”
“LD_PRELOAD on setuid Binaries… LD_PRELOAD Through Telnet…
Sun’s /dev/audio Bug… chfn CR Bug… ps Solaris /tmp Permissions
Bug… SGI colorview Bug…”
“So what have we learned from all of this? Well, if there’s one
thing that our brief jaunt through Unix history has taught us, it’s
that we should very carefully scrutinize any program that runs with
special privileges. And as the /dev/audio bug demonstrates, even if
you think you know everything about security, something else is
waiting just around the corner.”