4 ms·

> It's debatable whether this is effective at turning away attacks, but that's the goal, and ASLR is enabled on almost every operating system in use today. It'

> It's debatable whether this is effective at turning away attacks, but that's the goal, and ASLR is enabled on almost every operating system in use today. It's not debatable at all, ASLR is a significant barrier to attacks. Quote from a random hacking book: > By doing so, it makes it significantly harder for an attacker to predict the location of specific processes and data, such as the stack, heap, and libraries, thereby mitigating certain types of exploits, particularly buffer overflows. https://book.hacktricks.xyz/binary-exploitation/common-binary-protections-and-bypasses/aslr https://book.hacktricks.xyz/binary-exploitation/common-binar...

fargle 2y ago
> It's not debatable at all you do appear to be debating it...
- g15jv2dp 2y ago
  Stating facts is not "debating".
  - worik 2y ago
    > Stating facts is not "debating". But alternative facts?
  - fargle 2y ago
    "ASLR is a significant barrier to attacks." that is a position statement, not a fact. i don't care for, as is a very common theme here on HN, techbro-splaining that "it's a settled/widely known/etc. fact" when it is an opinion. actually, that's really all the author pointed out - didn't say it wasn't valuable, just said it could be debated. thus goading, of course, a snarky response (including a "random" quote from an unnamed book) about what ASLR does and therefore there can be no debate. i might agree with you, i might not agree you. but presenting facts, opinions, and arguments to support to reject a position sounds like a debate to me. what i will also say is that any universally qualified statement about the value of a security hardening feature, risk of a vulnerability, etc. is always wrong until the threat model and all other engineering factors are properly weighed. what is "significant" to situation A may be "security theater" in situation B.
saagarjha 2y ago
ASLR is generally pretty weak to completely ineffective against buffer overflows, because the linear layout of things generally does not change. It is more useful against a write-anywhere primitive (…in that you don't know where to write to).

fargle 2y ago

> It's not debatable at all you do appear to be debating it...

g15jv2dp 2y ago
Stating facts is not "debating".
- worik 2y ago
  > Stating facts is not "debating". But alternative facts?
- fargle 2y ago
  "ASLR is a significant barrier to attacks." that is a position statement, not a fact. i don't care for, as is a very common theme here on HN, techbro-splaining that "it's a settled/widely known/etc. fact" when it is an opinion. actually, that's really all the author pointed out - didn't say it wasn't valuable, just said it could be debated. thus goading, of course, a snarky response (including a "random" quote from an unnamed book) about what ASLR does and therefore there can be no debate. i might agree with you, i might not agree you. but presenting facts, opinions, and arguments to support to reject a position sounds like a debate to me. what i will also say is that any universally qualified statement about the value of a security hardening feature, risk of a vulnerability, etc. is always wrong until the threat model and all other engineering factors are properly weighed. what is "significant" to situation A may be "security theater" in situation B.

saagarjha 2y ago

ASLR is generally pretty weak to completely ineffective against buffer overflows, because the linear layout of things generally does not change. It is more useful against a write-anywhere primitive (…in that you don't know where to write to).