8 comments

  • teleforce 2 days ago
    >Google has rewarded us $92,337 in kernelCTF

    I'm all ears now

    • mrbluecoat 2 days ago
      Seems low considering the wide impact, but maybe the only thing corporations throw big money at is remote exploits?
      • tptacek 1 day ago
        That's a huge amount of money for a vulnerability.
  • goodburb 1 day ago
    Tested on three Android devices (version 9, 13, 16) with different Firefox versions under 150 (had to modify for older).

    Two boot looped, I had to enter recovery and the other just powered off [0].

    The demo modifies the wallpaper on supported Pixel devices.

    [0] IonStack https://rootme.nebusec.ai

    ____

    Tip: Install a Chromium flavor browser (Chromite) separate from the main browser.

    Disable Javascript and hardware accelerated video decoder (commonly exploited) from the flags page and enable reader mode to fix broken JS-dependent websites when browsing blogs and random sites on your personal devices, else dedicate a tablet.

  • amatecha 2 days ago
    Daaaaamn: "GhostLock was introduced in Linux 2.6.39 and fixed in Linux 7.1."
  • password4321 2 days ago
    Forgot to include "LPE" (local...) in the title so most of us can get back to weekending.
    • circularfoyers 2 days ago
      Since this enables container escape, sounds like this might still impact quite a lot of us?
      • password4321 1 day ago
        I guess, if you thought Docker/etc. was a security boundary
        • markasoftware 20 minutes ago
          Runpod, digital ocean's gpu cloud, and at least a few others use Linux containers for isolation between tenants (look at Wiz's blog post about the nvidia container toolkit bug; digitalocean just puts everyone in a massive k8s cluster)
        • circularfoyers 16 minutes ago
          I know there's a lot you can do in k8s to mitigate it, but I didn't think that prevented it outright.
      • hollerith 1 day ago
        A lot of us rely on Linux containers' being escape-proof?

        I would have hoped that only a few of us are so misinformed as to do that.

    • Chu4eeno 1 day ago
      they also found a type confusion in firefox/ionmonkey, so you can go from random website to pwned very quickly.
  • alexjplant 46 minutes ago
    > This is the same shape as many other life-cycle bugs [...]

    Claude-ism detected. According to it an object does not have a type or definition, apparently, but rather a shape (or at least it reaches for that word before more technically-accurate ones). Problems are not of a similar class or type, but of the same shape. Functions are not defined by their signatures but by their shape. Who talks like this and how did it make its way into the training data so pervasively?

    • dang 16 minutes ago
      I think you're probably right that the article was AI-assisted, but (if so) it's important not to confuse that property of the article with the thing the article is about. Google wouldn't pay $90k for a hallucination.

      I don't mean that as a criticism—the question of how to receive AI-processed content is a huge one that is in a state of chaotic turbulence right now. I'm working on a post about that over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149.

      Btw, Nebula Sec is a YC startup in the current batch. We've been working with them on how to launch on HN, and one of the things I've been trying to explain is that the HN audience won't respond well to LLM-generated reports. The underlying work, though, is very impressive. These guys know what they're doing—the OP is by no means their only significant find—and the fact that they're doing it with an agent, rather than the traditional way, is significant.

  • mixmastamyk 2 days ago
    A what?
    • happymellon 2 days ago
      Use after free?
      • dang 1 hour ago
        Thanks! I've put that in the toptext now.
    • teo_zero 1 day ago
      I'm glad someone else asked. :)

      It's not so widely used and it's not explained in the first couple screenfuls of TFA (which by itself is weirdly structured, taking entire paragraphs to explain when it was introduced, when it was discovered, etc. before even explaining what it actually is).

      Of course the title was chosen when the article was first published on a site dedicated to security, where probably everyone knows it. This suggests that insisting on unmodified titles when republishing in HN is a poor rule.

      • lkirkwood 1 day ago
        Not that everyone should know it but it's definitely widely used. A Google search for "stack UAF" also turns it up.
  • Uptrenda 51 minutes ago
    Has anyone in infosec ever seen the term "use after free" before LLMs? Or is this basically an acronym claude invented? I say this because I see claude use this term all the time like its common knowledge but in 15+ years in tech never seen it myself. I've seen all kinds of terms used to describe memory errors: memory corruption, heap corruption, stack corruption, whatever, just never this acronym.
    • mirashii 45 minutes ago
      This is and has been a common term in any systems programming concept for decades. You can, for example, search CVEs and easily find some from over 15 years ago: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2010-1119

      It was even enumerated in the first pass of CWE as CWE-416 in 2006.

    • LPisGood 46 minutes ago
      Yes, it was a common attack vector in binary exploitation. Heap based attack vector like use after free, double free, heap overflows, and others are pretty neat. They force you to learn a lot about how malloc works.

      There is a lot of cool work that went into making memory allocation work well; the different arenas, fast bins, chunk headers, etc. are super cool.

    • michaellee8 48 minutes ago
      if you have spend any amount of time in low level c vulnerabilities you will have heard about it, it is a very common time on the low level/cybersec space.
    • paulv 48 minutes ago
      It has been a known bug class for quite some time.
    • mdkotlik 48 minutes ago
      yes, it’s a very common term in infosec. I haven’t heard the “UAF” acronym before though
    • atoav 10 minutes ago
      Huh? That is a really common term. There have been even memes about it. I remember roughly 5 years ago I first heard the ironic; "Real men use after free" in a discussion about Rust's benefits as its borrowing checker would have also prevented this one.

      "Use after free" is also described in most standard books about C as a thing you should never do, have you read one?

    • asveikau 42 minutes ago
      I haven't really seen it as an acronym "UAF", but I can't recall the first time I heard "use after free". It was probably in the previous century.

      The idea that Claude came up with it is ridiculous.

    • Klonoar 43 minutes ago
    • abofh 49 minutes ago
      [flagged]
      • dang 28 minutes ago
        Please don't be snarky or cross into putdowns or personal attack. We're all in (let's call it) the unlucky 10,000 about something. About most things actually.

        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

      • LastTrain 39 minutes ago
        There is an interesting episode of This American Life about how everyone, everyone, has weird gaps in their knowledge that eventually get filled in sometimes fun or humiliating ways. You have these too.
        • dang 27 minutes ago
          Wow, what is that episode? I haven't listened to TAL in probably more than a decade but it was great for a long time, and for all I know still is.
          • LastTrain 6 minutes ago
            "A Little Bit of Knowledge"
      • defrost 34 minutes ago
        I can see that you're old and that I'm older, but I fail to see the justification for being snarky about that.

          Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
        
        ~ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        • abofh 32 minutes ago
          [flagged]
          • defrost 30 minutes ago
            And a wrong justifies a wrong?

            These are the times we make.

            • abofh 28 minutes ago
              [flagged]
      • Uptrenda 43 minutes ago
        [flagged]