Re: RFC: Adding a SECURITY.md document to the Binutils

On 2023-04-13 11:08, Paul Koning wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Apr 13, 2023, at 11:02 AM, Siddhesh Poyarekar <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> On 2023-04-13 10:50, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
>>> No, whilst elf can be executed, objdump should never be doing that: it's a tool for examining a file, not running it.  You have to have a tool that can safely examine the contents of an elf file or you can never verify it for issues - opening it up in emacs to examine the contents is not the way to do that :)
>>
>> You can verify it for issues, in a sandbox.
>>
>>> But all that is beside the point.  The original case I gave was a /corrupt/ elf file that caused a buffer overrun in the objdump binary.
>>
>> ... and that's a robustness issue.  Any buffer overrun in any program could in theory be exploited to send out files.
> 
> No.  Buffer overruns are generally recognized as security issues, precisely because they (often) can be used to produce arbitrary code execution exploits.

They're a common security exploit vector, but context matters.  If you 
have local access to a system, you can already execute arbitrary code; a 
buffer overrun itself is not going to help you do anything that you 
couldn't already do.  By letting in an untrusted file or by accepting 
inputs over a network, you're opening up a *new* vector to actually 
exploit the buffer overflow to do something you couldn't already do.

> A buiffer overrun would be merely a robustness issue if it is guaranteed to cause nothing worse than a program abort.

Context matters here too.  Over a network or under some circumstances 
with other kinds of untrusted input (such as downloaded files), a simple 
program abort will result in a DoS, which is a security issue.

Sid