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Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2017 08:58:26 +0200
From: Dominique Martinet <asmadeus@...ewreck.org>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: CoreOS membership to linux-distros

Sven Dowideit wrote on Wed, Jun 28, 2017:
> I'm responsible for RancherOS, and think that both I, and my users
> would prefer that I had access to the embargoed information earlier,
> so preparing a response would have been less of a rush.

I can relate to the rush feeling, even with few users/"private" distro
here, having a custom kernel makes this kind of fixes annoying...
But given the delayed exploit release I'd say it does not really matter
if you take a few days for this, especially in this case with the low
success rate on 64bit linux. As soon as reasonably possible does not
necessarily mean rush.

As a rhel/centos spin-off though we would have liked the bug brought up
here ( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1463241 ) to have its
fix published faster though, it's apparently been ready for a week but
not been published... I don't mind bugs, but if it's fixed it's annoying
to keep it behind closed doors.


> One of the things that would have made my last week less worrying, is
> to have some access to exploit code - so as to verify the changes
> actually had a useful effect.

You don't need an actual exploit to test this. You're not the first
person who have told me this so I actually took some time this morning
to whip up a "tester" -- it's probably far from perfect but will run
successfully on older debian/rhel and crash with a patched kernel as
expected, and is as inoffensive as it can get.

I'm sure there are other better testers online, I didn't try looking as
I don't get much chance to play with this kind of stuff :)


Qualys gave a lot of details in their report (kudos to well written
advisories like that!), I agree having everything on a golden plate is
better but it really isn't much work left for smaller distros if you
trust the big ones or even just upstream, once bugs got steamed out.

-- 
Asmadeus | Dominique Martinet

View attachment "teststackclash.c" of type "text/x-csrc" (1551 bytes)

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