Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: thoughts on kernel security issues | From | Valdis.Kletnieks@vt ... | Date | Tue, 25 Jan 2005 15:53:03 -0500 |
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On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 14:56:13 EST, John Richard Moser said:
> This puts pressure on the attacker; he has to find a bug, write an > exploit, and find an opportunity to use it before a patch is written and > applied to fix the exploit. If say 80% of exploits are suddenly > non-exploitable, then he's left with mostly very short windows that are > far and few, and thus may be beyond his level of UNION(task->skill, > task->luck) in many cases.
Correct.
> If you can circumvent protection A by simply using attack B* to disable > protection A to do more interesting attack A*, then protection A is > smoke and mirrors.
You however missed an important case here. If attack B is outside UNTION(task->skill, task->luck) protection A is *NOT* smoke-and-mirrors.
And for the *vast* majority of attackers, if they have a canned exploit for A and it doesn't work, they'll be stuck because B is outside their ability. [unhandled content-type:application/pgp-signature] | |