151–160 of 260 posts
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And it looks like it was a buffer overflow: https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research/2021... Would Rust prevent this?
Yes it would be prevented by the borrow checker.
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Static-everything is such a gimmick in my opinion. It sounds great until you try to do something useful with your code. It's almost never the case that people actually want to hard-code stuff in the source code. Almost always you read configuration files at run-time (like sudo does) and change your behavior depending on run-time information - so you will have run-time errors.
“Static” here means that variables are const by default, and you can’t modify one without explicitly marking it as mutable. In your case, a config object would be mutable inside the function that loads it from disk into memory, then read-only everywhere else by default.
It usually devolves into a lot of nested if-else and switch (match) instructions.
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In what sense? It is completely in the spirit of the GPL to reimplement a GPL tool from scratch with the same behavior and a different license. After all, that's how the free Unixes came about (though admittedly those were BSD licensed typically).
Kinda? Historically there were indeed concerns about reimplementation and copyright. One of the ways that the GNU Project tried to fight claims was to reimplement the tools using dynamically-allocated memory (instead of Unix's traditional fixed-size buffers) to make sure the implementation was sufficiently different. Other ways were making the implementation Posixly correct, adding internationalization or trying to p…
Free software projects should welcome multiple implementations and interoperability, because these are the mother's milk of free software. It's frankly incoherent, given values of free software, that a reimplementation of, for example, Unix coreutils (GNU) would find fault with a reimplementation of itself (uutils).
Notwithstanding how philosophically incoherent it is, a desire, now that Linux and free software have some market power, to be a bully back, to grasp for monopoly power, to play AT&T, is really distasteful. What's exciting about free software is not the artifact, Linux or coreutils or sudo, but that anyone can create new and interesting alternatives. That users get to make choices about which implementation to use. The existence of FreeBSD does not make Linux worse. It makes it better! The "solution" to an MIT licensed coreutils is a GNU licensed fork which is 10x better. Instead, we get complaints which amount to a kind of free software entitlement, an endless pissing and moaning about how other people won't do new things your way.
This is a major problem in the way that most normies view the GNU and the GPL. In the past, I may not have chosen the GPL for my own projects, but I'd be pleased to contribute to a GPL project. Now, I'd have a hard contributing to a GPL project, because of just how toxic this attitude (no other license matters but ours) is.
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For better or worse the use of GPL is going away, even the future of Linux kernel is not guaranteed. In the realm of IoT FOSS UNIX like operating systems, all the contendants are using a mix of Apache, MIT and BSD licenses, including the ZephyrOS sponsored by the Linux Foundation. When the GPL generation is gone from the face of the Earth, it won't last long that UNIX-like OSes get another steward alternative to the…
How would they be able to drop the GPL from the Linux kernel?
Linux kernel isn't the first nor the last UNIX clone.
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Static-everything is such a gimmick in my opinion. It sounds great until you try to do something useful with your code. It's almost never the case that people actually want to hard-code stuff in the source code. Almost always you read configuration files at run-time (like sudo does) and change your behavior depending on run-time information - so you will have run-time errors.
“Static” here means that variables are const by default, and you can’t modify one without explicitly marking it as mutable. In your case, a config object would be mutable inside the function that loads it from disk into memory, then read-only everywhere else by default.
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Whatever else happened in those 43 years, we had a widely-exploitable memory corruption vulnerability (Baron Samedit) as recently as 2021.
And it looks like it was a buffer overflow: https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research/2021... Would Rust prevent this?
As one of the original creators of sudo ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudo ) I've witnessed it getting nearly totally rewritten and then incrementally bug-fixed over the last 43 years. It must take the prize for the UNIX command most highly-scrutinized for security flaws. Flaws which have been identified and fixed. Thousands of developers and security experts have gone over it. So part of me wonders - how is it pos…
Seriously, better reimplementations are great. But weren't you shocked to read about all those weird sudo features? I mean, the normal stuff is very weird, subtle, and therefore fragile.
Anyone who uses sudo "deeply" should probably think about whether there are other ways.
As one of the original creators of sudo ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudo ) I've witnessed it getting nearly totally rewritten and then incrementally bug-fixed over the last 43 years. It must take the prize for the UNIX command most highly-scrutinized for security flaws. Flaws which have been identified and fixed. Thousands of developers and security experts have gone over it. So part of me wonders - how is it pos…
It can eliminate many bugs, but it certainly wouldn’t eliminate all bugs. During implementation they realized they were not implementing sudo’s (undocumented) feature of failing to run if the sudoers file is world-writable: https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/testing-sudo-rs/ . Of course they did find and fix the bug, but in general Rust isn’t going to protect you from bugs like this that are essentially logic errors.
https://www.sudo.ws/repos/sudo/file/SUDO_1_8_6/doc/sudoers.m...
This is also a very common behaviour for security sensitive applications to check config file permissions. Another example I remember are ssh private keys.
I might be to harsh but it is not so trustworthy they still made this error and still miss the documentation.
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It can eliminate many bugs, but it certainly wouldn’t eliminate all bugs. During implementation they realized they were not implementing sudo’s (undocumented) feature of failing to run if the sudoers file is world-writable: https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/testing-sudo-rs/ . Of course they did find and fix the bug, but in general Rust isn’t going to protect you from bugs like this that are essentially logic errors.
That is documented. Since the mercurial web interface isn't very nice to use I picked a random version. sudo 1.8.6 from 2012 writes in the man page "The sudoers file must not be world-writable,". https://www.sudo.ws/repos/sudo/file/SUDO_1_8_6/doc/sudoers.m... This is also a very common behaviour for security sensitive applications to check config file permissions. Another example I remember are ssh private keys. I mi…
The language it’s in is ‘mdoc’ - a markup format for man pages: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?mdoc
It’s the source code for the man page, which is about as documentationey as you can get.