OSNews is Exploring the Future of Computing

The Sky Isn't Falling: A Look at a New Vista Security Bypass

Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Mon 11th Aug 2008 16:13 UTC, submitted by gonzo

Ars Technica has analyzed recently publicized Vista's security flaws. "Unfortunate, yes, but not as was reported in the immediate aftermath of the presentation evidence that Vista's security is useless, nor does this work constitute a major security issue. And it's not game over, either. Sensationalism sells, and there's no news like bad news, but sometimes particularly when covering security issues, it would be nice to see accuracy and level-headedness instead. ... Furthermore, these attacks are specifically on the buffer overflow protections; they do not circumvent the IE Protected Mode sandbox, nor Vista's (in)famous UAC restrictions."

10 41 Comment(s)

http://osne.ws/fkf

Permalink for comment 326520
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.

Comment by Soulbender

by Soulbender on Mon 11th Aug 2008 17:17 UTC

Member since:
2005-08-18

Unfortunately, security researchers are a clever lot

Uh, wait, so the problem is that security researchers find them? Not that they exist to begin with?

Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 both opt out of DEP

You can opt out? That's brilliant security design, right there.

does this work constitute a major security issue.

Really? What the hell does? While it's not really game over it sure is a big problem.

Alarmism helps no one

And neither does understating the seriousness.

it would be good to see it coupled with responsible reporting.

Oh the irony.

The work done by Dowd and Sotirov focuses on making buffer overflows that were previously not exploitable on Vista exploitable. These are buffer overflows that would be exploitable on Windows XP anyway;

So what? Exactly how dos the fact that "this would work on XP too" make this less serious?

Furthermore, these attacks are specifically on the buffer overflow protections; they do not circumvent the IE Protected Mode sandbox, nor Vista's (in)famous UAC restrictions.

Oh ok then. Since it only circumvents them I guess that's ok.

DEP, ASLR, and the other mitigation features in Vista are unlikely to ever be unbreakable

No shit Sherlock. Unfortunately, again, that doesn't make this any less of a problem.

Internet Explorer on Vista runs in a highly restricted environment, so that even when it is running malicious code it cannot harm the system.

Except when it runs code with buffer overruns, I guess?

It would appear Mr Bright is none too.

Reply Permalink Bookmark Score: 8