A fifteen year old TCP bug?

#1

Post by Sec » Thu, Mar 24, 2011, 1:58 PM UTC

A fifteen year old TCP bug?
blogmal.42.org

Re: A fifteen year old TCP bug?

#2

Post by pilom » Thu, Mar 24, 2011, 3:12 PM UTC

This is true hacking news! Discusses a possible new bug in TCP, teaches how TCP works, has links to useful and relevant books on the subject, AND includes remarks about how difficult it is for a newbie to actually make changes to open source software and not get yelled at. I love it!

Re: A fifteen year old TCP bug?

#3

Post by rwmj » Thu, Mar 24, 2011, 3:21 PM UTC

pilom wrote: post #2

This is true hacking news! Discusses a possible new bug in TCP, teaches how TCP works, has links to useful and relevant books on the subject, AND includes remarks about how difficult it is for a newbie to actually make changes to open source software and not get yelled at. I love it!

.. and comes from a cool hackerish domain (42.org)

Re: A fifteen year old TCP bug?

#4

Post by feintruled » Thu, Mar 24, 2011, 3:55 PM UTC

The response to the bug report looks depressingly typical. Rejects the working fix with a wall of text speculation on numerous other possibly better fixes (without deigning to actually choose one). Nirvana fallacy in action!

Re: A fifteen year old TCP bug?

#5

Post by runjake » Thu, Mar 24, 2011, 4:04 PM UTC

The response to the bug report was by Bruce Evans, who is listed as the "Style Police-Meister" for FreeBSD. Apparently his job is to enforce standards & code style. Seems like he was doing his job.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committe...

Edit: edited for clarity. Thanks, pinko!

Re: A fifteen year old TCP bug?

#6

Post by mrspeaker » Thu, Mar 24, 2011, 4:04 PM UTC

pilom wrote: post #2

This is true hacking news! Discusses a possible new bug in TCP, teaches how TCP works, has links to useful and relevant books on the subject, AND includes remarks about how difficult it is for a newbie to actually make changes to open source software and not get yelled at. I love it!

I agree - but it's funny that there's only a handful of comments. You just can't have an uninformed rant with such technical correctness (the best kind of correctness)!

Re: A fifteen year old TCP bug?

#7

Post by ig1 » Thu, Mar 24, 2011, 4:18 PM UTC

I only had a quick skim through the article (need to be off to the London HN meetup shortly!), but couldn't this be used to mount a DOS attack sucking up the number of available sockets on a server?

Re: A fifteen year old TCP bug?

#8

Post by HenryR » Thu, Mar 24, 2011, 4:28 PM UTC

Is Stevens vol. 2 in the public domain now? If not, that's pretty poor form, linking to a scanned pdf of the book.

Re: A fifteen year old TCP bug?

#9

Post by barrkel » Thu, Mar 24, 2011, 4:32 PM UTC

So much of this is caused by unsigned types. They are evil; avoid them wherever you can.

Re: A fifteen year old TCP bug?

#10

Post by 1amzave » Thu, Mar 24, 2011, 4:50 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #9

So much of this is caused by unsigned types. They are evil; avoid them wherever you can.

Care to elaborate? Unlike signed ones, unsigned integral types at least have well-defined behavior on shifting and overflow. (I'm speaking in terms C specifically here, of course.)