11 points segfaultbuserr 1 hour ago 3 comments

gumby 27 minutes ago | parent

> Data-only attacks ... have long been considered too sophisticated and niche to pose a practical threat.

I thought the whole point of fuzzing was an example of finding data-only attacks.

segfaultbuserr 7 minutes ago | parent

Corrupting program memory via malicious input data is known as a code-execution attack, not a data-only attack. The fuzzed program crashes because its executable code got overwritten directly by the input, or it got overwritten indirectly by the logic when it tries to process bad data. An exploit involves injecting external code, or overwriting memory addresses to change the original logic flow to do something else.

A data-only attack would be an attack that reuses the original logic by only corrupting data inputs (such as a file path), without injecting code or changing logic.

Terr_ 6 minutes ago | parent

> The attack effectively modifies only the arguments of the execve syscall

I feel this checklist of shell-tools [0] is relevant, although the focus is more on how setuid is dangerous because you might not know the fancier arguments someone could supply.

> GTFOBins is a curated list of Unix-like executables that can be used to bypass local security restrictions in misconfigured systems.

[0] https://gtfobins.org/