Uncontrolled Format String
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Uncontrolled Format String
Uncontrolled format string is a type of software vulnerability discovered around 1989 that can be used in security exploits. Originally thought harmless, format string exploits can be used to crash a program or to execute harmful code. The problem stems from the use of unchecked user input as the format string parameter in certain C functions that perform formatting, such as printf(). A malicious user may use the %s and %x format tokens, among others, to print data from the call stack or possibly other locations in memory. One may also write arbitrary data to arbitrary locations using the %n format token, which commands printf() and similar functions to write the number of bytes formatted to an address stored on the stack. Details A typical exploit uses a combination of these techniques to take control of the instruction pointer (IP) of a process, for example by forcing a program to overwrite the address of a library function or the return address on the stack with a pointer ...
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Software Vulnerability
Vulnerabilities are flaws in a computer system that weaken the overall security of the device/system. Vulnerabilities can be weaknesses in either the hardware itself, or the software that runs on the hardware. Vulnerabilities can be exploited by a threat actor, such as an attacker, to cross privilege boundaries (i.e. perform unauthorized actions) within a computer system. To exploit a vulnerability, an attacker must have at least one applicable tool or technique that can connect to a system weakness. In this frame, vulnerabilities are also known as the attack surface. Vulnerability management is a cyclical practice that varies in theory but contains common processes which include: discover all assets, prioritize assets, assess or perform a complete vulnerability scan, report on results, remediate vulnerabilities, verify remediation - repeat. This practice generally refers to software vulnerabilities in computing systems. Agile vulnerability management refers preventing attacks b ...
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C Shell
The C shell (csh or the improved version, tcsh) is a Unix shell created by Bill Joy while he was a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. It has been widely distributed, beginning with the 2BSD release of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) which Joy first distributed in 1978. Other early contributors to the ideas or the code were Michael Ubell, Eric Allman, Mike O'Brien and Jim Kulp. The C shell is a command processor which is typically run in a text window, allowing the user to type and execute commands. The C shell can also read commands from a file, called a script. Like all Unix shells, it supports filename wildcarding, piping, here documents, command substitution, variables and control structures for condition-testing and iteration. What differentiated the C shell from others, especially in the 1980s, were its interactive features and overall style. Its new features made it easier and faster to use. The overall style ...
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Cross-site Scripting
Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of security vulnerability that can be found in some web applications. XSS attacks enable attackers to inject client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users. A cross-site scripting vulnerability may be used by attackers to bypass access controls such as the same-origin policy. Cross-site scripting carried out on websites accounted for roughly 84% of all security vulnerabilities documented by Symantec up until 2007.During the second half of 2007, 11,253 site-specific cross-site vulnerabilities were documented by XSSed, compared to 2,134 "traditional" vulnerabilities documented by Symantec, in XSS effects vary in range from petty nuisance to significant security risk, depending on the sensitivity of the data handled by the vulnerable site and the nature of any security mitigation implemented by the site's owner network. Background Security on the web depends on a variety of mechanisms, including an underlying concept of trust known ...
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Cross-application Scripting
Cross-application scripting (CAS) is a vulnerability affecting desktop applications that don't check input in an exhaustive way. CAS allows an attacker to insert data that modifies the behaviour of a particular desktop application. This makes it possible to extract data from inside of the users' systems. Attackers may gain the full privileges of the attacked application when exploiting CAS vulnerabilities; the attack is to some degree independent of the underlying operating system and hardware architecture. Initially discovered by Emanuele Gentili and presented with two other researchers (Alessandro Scoscia and Emanuele Acri) that had participated in the study of the technique and its implications, it was presented for the first time during the Security Summit 2010 in Milan. The format string attack is very similar in concept to this attack and CAS could be considered as a generalization of this attack method. Some aspects of this technique have been previously demonstrated in cl ...
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GNU Compiler Collection
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is an optimizing compiler produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages, hardware architectures and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC as free software under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain and the standard compiler for most projects related to GNU and the Linux kernel. With roughly 15 million lines of code in 2019, GCC is one of the biggest free programs in existence. It has played an important role in the growth of free software, as both a tool and an example. When it was first released in 1987 by Richard Stallman, GCC 1.0 was named the GNU C Compiler since it only handled the C programming language. It was extended to compile C++ in December of that year. Front ends were later developed for Objective-C, Objective-C++, Fortran, Ada, D and Go, among others. The OpenMP and OpenACC specifications are also supported in the C ...
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TESO (Austrian Hacker Group)
TESO was a hacker group, which originated in Austria. It was active from 1998 to 2004, and during its peak around 2000, it was responsible for a significant share of the exploits on the bugtraq mailing list. History In 1998, Teso was founded, and quickly grew to 6 people, which first met in 1999 at the CCC Camp near Berlin. By 2000, the group was at its peak, and started speaking on various conferences, wrote articles for Phrack and released security tools and exploits at a very high pace. Some of its exploits only became known after leaking to the community. This included exploits for wu-ftp, apache, and openssh. 2000 First remote vulnerabilitin OpenBSD followed by a series of remote exploits against OpenBSD (some co-authored with ADM). Forced OpenBSD to remove the claim from the OpenBSD webpage "7 years without vulnerability". In September 2001 released comprehensivFormat String Research Paperby scut describing uncontrolled format string vulnerabilities. In 2003 ...
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Tim Newsham
Tim Newsham is a computer security professional. He has been contributing to the security community for more than a decade. He has performed research while working at security companies including @stake, Guardent, ISS, and Network Associates (originally Secure Networks). Contributions Newsham is best known for co-authoring the paper ''Insertion, Evasion and Denial of Service: Eluding Network Intrusion Detection'' with Thomas Ptacek, a paper that has been cited by more than 150 academic works on Network Intrusion Detection since. He has published other prominent white papers: * ''The Problem With Random Increments'' * ''Format String Attacks'' * ''Cracking WEP Keys: Applying Known Techniques to WEP Keys'' In addition to his research, Newsham is also known for his pioneering work on security products, including: * Internet Security Scanner * Ballista (Cybercop) Scanner * The software that would later drive Veracode WEP Security Newsham partially discovered the Newsham 21-bit W ...
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Przemysław Frasunek
Przemysław Frasunek (also known as venglin, born 6 May 1983) is a "white hat" hacker from Poland. He has been a frequent Bugtraq poster since late in the 1990s, noted for one of the first published successful software exploits for the format string bug class of attacks, just after the first exploit of the person using nickname tf8. Until that time the vulnerability was thought harmless. Vulnerability research Notable vulnerabilities credited to Przemysław Frasunek: * , Format string bug in WU-FTPD WU-FTPD (more fully wuarchive-ftpd, also frequently spelled in lowercase as wu-ftpd) is a free FTP server software (daemon) for Unix-like operating systems. It was originally written by Chris Myers and Bryan D. O'Connor in Washington Universi ... (''remote root exploit''), one of the first exploits for the format string bug class of attacks. * , Buffer overflow (''remote root exploit'') in NTP server, affecting wide range of systems. * , Signal race condition in FTP server ...
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Bugtraq
Bugtraq was an electronic mailing list dedicated to issues about computer security. On-topic issues are new discussions about vulnerabilities, vendor security-related announcements, methods of exploitation, and how to fix them. It was a high-volume mailing list, with as many as 776 posts in a month, and almost all new security vulnerabilities were discussed on the list in its early days. The forum provided a vehicle for anyone to disclose and discuss computer vulnerabilities, including security researchers and product vendors. While the service has not been officially terminated, and its archives are still publicly accessible, no new posts have been made since January 2021. History Bugtraq was created on November 5, 1993 by Scott Chasin in response to the perceived failings of the existing Internet security infrastructure of the time, particularly CERT. Bugtraq's policy was to publish vulnerabilities, regardless of vendor response, as part of the full disclosure movement of vu ...
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Snprintf
The C programming language provides many standard library functions for file input and output. These functions make up the bulk of the C standard library header . The functionality descends from a "portable I/O package" written by Mike Lesk at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, and officially became part of the Unix operating system in Version 7. The I/O functionality of C is fairly low-level by modern standards; C abstracts all file operations into operations on streams of bytes, which may be "input streams" or "output streams". Unlike some earlier programming languages, C has no direct support for random-access data files; to read from a record in the middle of a file, the programmer must create a stream, seek to the middle of the file, and then read bytes in sequence from the stream. The stream model of file I/O was popularized by Unix, which was developed concurrently with the C programming language itself. The vast majority of modern operating systems have inherited strea ...
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ProFTPD
ProFTPD (short for ''Pro FTP daemon'') is an FTP server. ProFTPD is Free and open-source software, compatible with Unix-like systems and Microsoft Windows (via Cygwin). Along with vsftpd and Pure-FTPd, ProFTPD is among the most popular FTP servers in Unix-like environments today. Compared to those, which focus e.g. on simplicity, speed or security, ProFTPD's primary design goal is to be a highly feature rich FTP server, exposing a large amount of configuration options to the user. Supported platforms * AIX * BSD/OS * DG/UX * Digital Unix * FreeBSD * HP/UX * IRIX * Linux for IBM S/390, zSeries * Linux * Mac OS X * NetBSD * OpenBSD * SCO * Solaris * SunOS * Windows (via Cygwin) Configuration and features ProFTPD includes a number of options that are not available with many other FTP daemons. The configuration of ProFTPD is performed in a single main configuration file called /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf. Due to its similarities to the configuration file of Apache HTTP Server ...
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Security Audit
An information security audit is an audit on the level of information security in an organization. It is an independent review and examination of system records, activities and related documents. These audits are intended to improve the level of information security, avoid improper information security designs, and optimize the efficiency of the security safeguards and security processes. Within the broad scope of auditing information security there are multiple types of audits, multiple objectives for different audits, etc. Most commonly the controls being audited can be categorized to technical, physical and administrative. Auditing information security covers topics from auditing the physical security of data centers to auditing the logical security of databases, and highlights key components to look for and different methods for auditing these areas. When centered on the Information technology (IT) aspects of information security, it can be seen as a part of an information te ...
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