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That seems uncharitable; it was not that trivial of a cheat. They inserted a realistic type of vulnerability that was not specific to their test. > we first co
by scintill76 5y ago
That seems uncharitable; it was not that trivial of a cheat. They inserted a realistic type of vulnerability that was not specific to their test.
> we first copied fqzcomp from https://sourceforge.net/projects/fqzcomp/and https://sourceforge.net/projects/fqzcomp/and inserted a vulnerability into version 4.6 of its source code; a function that processes and compresses DNA reads individually, using a fixed-size buffer to store the compressed data. This modification lets us perform a buffer overflow with a longer than expected DNA read in order to hijack control flow. While the use of such a fixed-size buffer is an obvious vulnerability, we note that fqzcomp already contains over two dozen static buffers.
> The modified fqzcomp program contained a buffer too small for the 177 base pair read length, so it would overflow after processing the first read.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity17/sec17-ney.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...
- busymom0 5y agoI think your link should be: https://sourceforge.net/projects/fqzcomp/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/fqzcomp/ needs a space before "and".
- amelius 5y agoBut any program that takes input is potentially vulnerable to this kind of attack. I honestly don't get the point. Also, one solution seems simple: run the software inside a virtual machine.
- simonh 5y agoIf the attack is to e.g. get the software to report a different gene sequence to the real one, this isn't going to help you. For example you might encode such an attack to mask the gene sequence of a viral weapon.
- amelius 5y agoYes, that's a good point.
- scintill76 5y agoI guess the point is to prove this novel attack vector. And they found interesting things that don't always show up in a buffer attack: there are certain restrictions on patterns that can be viably encoded physically, parallel sequencing can chunk up the input in unpredictable ways, the input might be read backwards by the sequencer.
- Firadeoclus 5y ago> While the use of such a fixed-size buffer is an obvious vulnerability, we note that fqzcomp already contains over two dozen static buffers. It should be noted that "static buffers" are not per se a vulnerability. This sentence reads like they equate the two.