Hello Warren, On Thu, 2017-02-09 at 15:27 -0700, Warren Young wrote: > So you’ve now sprayed the heap on this system, but you can’t upload > anything else to it because noexec, so…now what? What has our > nefarious attacker gained? So the heap is set with data provided by the (local) attacker who could initialize it to his liking using either of the two memory leaks in the options parsing. The heap, that is entirely under the control of the attacker, now contains a call to a library with parameters such that it invokes a zero day kernel escalation privilege exploit. And now the exploit will run because pkcheck allowed the attacker to initialize its entire heap via the command line. Had the two memory leaks in the pkcheck options parsing been fixed the attacker should have looked for another path to leverage his zero day. So the mere fact that an untrusted user is able to massage the heap of a binary (pkcheck in this case) to run whatever code he wants is a serious attack vector and thus those two memory leaks should be fixed. Because they allow bad people to leverage attacks with much more ease. Regards, Leonard. -- mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research