Skip to content

Comment on Bringing Memory Safety to sudo and suparent

Comments

And, in fact, that's what the overwhelming majority of sudo vulnerabilities are; they're not generally memory safety bugs.

Only if you count all vulnerabilities as equal. There have been lots of sudo vulnerabilities over the years, but most of them either only affected configurations that allow users to run specific commands (unlike most configurations which are all-or-nothing), or had even more unusual requirements. I think the only sudo vulnerability in a long time that affected the default configuration is CVE-2021-3156 – and that was a memory safety bug.

Sure. That was the vulnerability I was thinking about too. I think the biggest knock I've heard against what Prossimo is doing --- and I respect & admire the people working on that project! --- from exploit-dev types is, they're picking targets that nobody thinks are likely to cough up more meaningful memory corruption vulnerabilities. I agree: 2021-3156 is a good argument for memory safety. Memory safety is a good argument! But if you're ranking "next things to make memory safe", sudo is, maybe counterintuitively, a little unattractive.

What's your ranking for "next things to make memory safe"? I'm going to guess the TLS stack would be #1, considering fly.io's sponsorship of rustls. Eager to hear the rest of the list.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.