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CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq

136 pointsby chizhik-pyzhiktoday at 6:12 PM40 commentsview on HN

Comments

strenholmetoday at 7:46 PM

Shameless plug time:

My own MaraDNS has been extensively audited now that we’re in the age of AI-assisted security audits.

Not one single serious security bug has been found since 2023. [1]

The only bugs auditers have been finding are things like “Deadwood, when fully recursive, will take longer than usual to release resources when getting this unusual packet” [2] or “This side utility included with MaraDNS, which hasn’t been able to be compiled since 2022, has a buffer overflow, but only if one’s $HOME is over 50 characters in length” [3]

I’m actually really pleased just how secure MaraDNS is now that it’s getting real in depth security audits.

[1] https://samboy.github.io/MaraDNS/webpage/security.html

[2] https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS/discussions/136

[3] https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS/pull/137

washingupliquidtoday at 7:14 PM

Maybe this is the kick in the ass Debian needs to upgrade the embarrassingly ancient dnsmasq in "stable" because while I can't think of any new features, the latest versions contain many non-CVE bug fixes.

But I doubt it, they will lazily backport these patches to create some frankenstein one-off version and be done with it.

Before anyone says "tHaT's wHaT sTaBlE iS fOr": they have literally shipped straight-up broken packages before, because fixing it would somehow make it not "stable". They would rather ship useless, broken code than something too new. It's crazy.

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romaniitedomumtoday at 6:54 PM

To quote a famous (in certain circles) bowl of petunias, "oh no, not again!"

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rela-12w987today at 8:30 PM

The AI bug report tsunami is not in all projects. As the top comment notes, MaraDNS didn't have any. I assume djbdns and tinydns didn't either, otherwise they'd shout it from the rooftops.

I never understood why some projects get extremely popular and others don't. I also suspect by now that the reports by tools that are "too dangerous to release" scan all projects but selectively only contact those with issues, so that they never have to admit that their tool didn't find anything.

washingupliquidtoday at 6:58 PM

It's a good thing this software isn't used in millions of devices which almost never receive updates.

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xydactoday at 7:20 PM

some of these would have made to embedded hardwares, making updates more challenging if say you were to flash an update.

dist-epochtoday at 7:07 PM

How bad is it if someone infects my home router using such a thing? They can MITM non-encrypted requests, but there are not a lot of those, right?

What else can they do, assuming the computers behind the router are all patched up.

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mrbluecoattoday at 7:57 PM

> The tsunami of AI-generated bug reports shows no signs of stopping, so it is likely that this process will have to be repeated again soon.

Welcome to the new world order.

ck2today at 7:23 PM

if machine-learning can find all these holes

why can't machine-learning write a product from scratch that is flawless?

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cedumtoday at 7:50 PM

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