"Month of Kernel Bugs" Project Head Interviewed

An anonymous reader writes "November has been labelled the 'Month of Kernel Bugs' in security circles. The Month of Kernel Bugs began on November 1, with the publication of a vulnerability in Apple's AirPort drivers. SecuriTeam blogs did an interview with LMH, who hosts the project."

Re:A question I wish was answered

[bcat24]

The Month of Kernel Bugs is the brainchild of a security researcher and contributor to the Metasploit Project who uses the moniker "L.M.H."

(cite) [securityfocus.com]

Re:Apple flaw? No.

[spinja]

The bug I found is not due to the card "complying with a standard", its because the first-generation Airport driver (the latest one available at that), has a bug that allows someone to run code in your kernel from a distance. Maybe I missed the "ieee80211b-pwned" spec, but this doesn't seem like good behavior.

Why is that Apple supporters are in such denial about their favorite products having security flaws? This bug was one of many in the Airport drivers and one an even bigger set of wireless exploits that we plan on releasing. A Broadcom bug was released today which likely affects more systems than Apple has ever shipped.

Re:/sigh stupid FUD

[spinja]

This particular one was only in the first-generation Airport drivers. It may affect Windows users of the Proxim/Orinoco/Lucent chips as well, but we didn't have any hardware to test on.

Shifty business in the kernel.

[Kadin2048]

I have never been involved, even peripherally, in kernel development, so I thought some of LMH's comments on how security concerns are addressed there were interesting.

In particular, he remarks: "Another point, is actually that silent patches are much more popular in kernel development. Remote denial of service issues may be patched under rather fun terms like 'this may dereference a null pointer', 'foo is signed when it should be unsigned', etc. And some kernel interfaces are literally a royal pain to work with. Filesystem code itself is a rather complex part of the kernel as it deals in low-level with things we typically know 'abstracted' (ex. you copy files, you don't deal with inodes, blocks, etc)."

This seems rather contrary to the OSS development model in general, and if it's something that's happening a lot, it seems as though something's wrong, procedurally. Why is all this buggy code getting in, in the first place? While I'm aware that a lot of Linux people don't like BSD or its development methods, maybe there needs to be some sort of stricter review process for contributions.

If there was one place where transparency and accountability were most important, it seems like it would be in the Linux kernel, it being arguably one of the most important projects, or at least most visible, that the F/OSS movement has produced.

Re:/sigh stupid FUD

[spinja]

Current drivers for the first-generation cards (the non-extreme) ones. This limited the bug to Mac hardware shipped between 1999 and 2003. We have some reproducable crashes in the latest Atheros-based cards as well (all new Intel Macs), but need to finish the research before we talk about it.

MOKB

[PhunkySchtuff]

If you're after more info on the Month of Kernel Bugs, check out the blog [blogspot.com]

No, this isn't my blog, and I've got nothing to do with it, it's just that it's not linked to or mentioned in the main story...