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Can you paste some part where they actually talk about the vulnerability? I assume that the title quoted above was the original title of the post since that's

by wheels 17y ago

Can you paste some part where they actually talk about the vulnerability? I assume that the title quoted above was the original title of the post since that's what's used on HN and Reddit.

scott_s 17y ago
The first two paragraphs clearly talk about it in the context of a security vulnerability. They don't explain how to exploit the vulnerability, but one versed in systems programming should either realize what it is, or be able to easily find it through Google or the pages they referenced in those paragraphs. If you Google "linux kernel null pointer exploit" you will find many examples.
- wheels 17y ago
  So you think most people found the post interesting because of the thing that they're actually going to talk about next time rather than the actual content? I believe that it's been widely read because of the novelty of avoiding crashes when dereferencing null pointers; in fact, for anyone who could have jumped to the conclusions about how the exploit would work, they could have reduced it to one line: "You can map address 0x0 with mmap and then segfaults on deferencing null don't happen." All of the rest of the article is only useful to people who don't know systems programming. At any rate, I'm not sure that our fundamental disagreement is that wide; clearly the article is laying down a building block for a later piece on the security exploit and it was written to serve that purpose. This seems to be your point. My point is the actual content can stand alone and, in fact does, and is not about security.
  - scott_s 17y ago
    That is my point, and because of that, I find your blog post disingenuous. You ignored the stated purpose of their post and presented it as something it was not.
  - Locke1689 17y ago
    So you think most people found the post interesting because of the thing that they're actually going to talk about next time rather than the actual content? Actually, yes. I posted a comment on the previous article saying so. The information in the current article is rather trite. The intricacies of kernel privilege escalation is a different story.

by wheels 17y ago

Can you paste some part where they actually talk about the vulnerability? I assume that the title quoted above was the original title of the post since that's what's used on HN and Reddit.

scott_s 17y ago

The first two paragraphs clearly talk about it in the context of a security vulnerability. They don't explain how to exploit the vulnerability, but one versed in systems programming should either realize what it is, or be able to easily find it through Google or the pages they referenced in those paragraphs. If you Google "linux kernel null pointer exploit" you will find many examples.

wheels 17y ago
So you think most people found the post interesting because of the thing that they're actually going to talk about next time rather than the actual content? I believe that it's been widely read because of the novelty of avoiding crashes when dereferencing null pointers; in fact, for anyone who could have jumped to the conclusions about how the exploit would work, they could have reduced it to one line: "You can map address 0x0 with mmap and then segfaults on deferencing null don't happen." All of the rest of the article is only useful to people who don't know systems programming. At any rate, I'm not sure that our fundamental disagreement is that wide; clearly the article is laying down a building block for a later piece on the security exploit and it was written to serve that purpose. This seems to be your point. My point is the actual content can stand alone and, in fact does, and is not about security.
- scott_s 17y ago
  That is my point, and because of that, I find your blog post disingenuous. You ignored the stated purpose of their post and presented it as something it was not.
- Locke1689 17y ago
  So you think most people found the post interesting because of the thing that they're actually going to talk about next time rather than the actual content? Actually, yes. I posted a comment on the previous article saying so. The information in the current article is rather trite. The intricacies of kernel privilege escalation is a different story.