Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Even a bug-free program might be exploitable.

That sounds like a bug

There are programs like sudo whose entire reason for existing is to enable privilege escalation. If you can find a way to make a user "sudo" something, that's an exploit, but it's not a bug in the program.

At that point you're exploiting the user, who is not a bug-free program

Remove user and press any key to continue.

:-P

Indeed, the user is the hardest part of the program to secure.

But if you squint, it might be a bug in the system to allow access to that program.

That's also not exploiting the program, it's exploiting the user.

Alternatively, consider any program which loads dynamic shared libraries (called "plugins" in many contexts). The program itself might be bug free; any plugin that is loaded will run (typically) with the full priviledges and access of the program (and thus likely the user).

The user may have no idea that the plugin is malicious; the program remains bug-free (if it was beforehand).

At least with plugins most people have a general notion that they run some sort of code as they provide some new functionality.

Much more agregiously you can design harmless a looking format that can run arbitrary code e.g. .doc with VBS. I have a very hard time blaming an user who falls for that even though MS puts up a scary looking popup.

Nope, sudo is safer, the alternative is running everything as root.

Totally a feature

Reply on news.ycombinator.com