Star Homeland Security Audit Flags 'Critical' X Bug
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd May 2006 20:28 UTC
X11, Window Managers An open-source security audit program funded by the US Department of Homeland Security has flagged a critical vulnerability in the X Window System which is used in Unix and Linux systems. Coverity, the San Franciso-based company managing the project under a $1.25 million grant, described the flaw as the "biggest security vulnerability" found in the X Window System code since 2000.
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dotMatt
Member since:
2005-07-29

Normally, but here a function and a variable had the same name "foo". So:

if (foo=0){do something}

should have been:

if (foo()=0){do something}

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mcrumley Member since:
2005-06-29


Normally, but here a function and a variable had the same name "foo". So:

if (foo=0){do something}

should have been:

if (foo()=0){do something}


But that is missing both the opening and the closing parenthesis. The article said, "This was caused by something as seemingly harmless as a missing closing parenthesis."

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siride Member since:
2006-01-02

Yes, well, the article is wrong then. It was a whole pair of parentheses: geteuid instead of geteuid().

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smitty Member since:
2005-10-13

Even without the variable, I think foo would be a function pointer which would be non-zero, and therefore foo==0 would always be false. Remember that X is written in C, so lots of things that higher-level languages would catch might slip through.

At first I thought they meant a single ) parenthesis was missing, but it would had to have been a pair or the compiler would have complained.

Edited 2006-05-03 23:26

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