The Story of a Simple and Dangerous Kernel Bug

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25 pointsmindplunge2 comments

Simple - Yes. Dangerous - I don't really see how. While it may be possible to overwrite 8 bytes of kernel memory prior to a panic I'm not really sure what's so dangerous about that, nor does the article demonstrate any exploit.

If such a program manages to make it onto your machine in the first place there are also far more nefarious things that it cold be doing.

If you can overwrite 8 bytes of kernel memory, you can do absolutely anything to the machine. You don't have to cause it to panic, you can instead modify some function to run your code first.

I couldn't say for sure, but this would probably allow someone to become root on the machine from a local user account.

But at least it is not exploitable remotely.

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