4 ms·

atop freaks out if it isn't talking to the thing it thinks it's talking to... who would have thunked it... I feel like a lot of programs have that issue.

• kccqzy 2y ago
  It's acceptable to freak out by crashing. It's even acceptable to crash via explicit assertion failure if the developers don't want to write proper error handling. It's not acceptable to crash via segmentation fault.
  • dzaima 2y ago
    It's to an extent even acceptable to crash via segmentation fault (more specifically, doing whatever unsafe exploitable things may come of the source of the issue) if it takes the same amount of privileges to cause the crash as the thing crashing has. And that's the important thing violated here, atop being rather reasonably ran by root to examine root processes, whereas the exploiter just needs the ability to host a thing on a specific port.
  • uecker 2y ago
    A segmentation fault is perfectly fine as long as an attacker can not cause any other action before it (but I guess this is the case here).
    • Polizeiposaune 2y ago
      Ah, but will it always segementation fault? It can be difficult to prove that an out-of-bounds memory reference triggered by malformed input will always result in a segmentation fault instead of a read or write of an "interesting" memory location.
      • uecker 2y ago
        This depends. In this, I guess the issue is that there is some oob memory reference. But for example a null pointer deference resulting in a segmentation fault is not (necessarily) a security problem.