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RagingCactustoday at 5:57 PM2 repliesview on HN

As a security person it is tiring to see so many people here either directly claim or at least allude to the claim that this is somehow much less scary because the _published_ exploit does not bypass ASLR. The writeup claims there is a way to reliably bypass ASLR with this attack. And that is a good default assumption I would be willing to believe without evidence.

ASLR is a defense-in-depth technique intended to make exploitation more difficult. In almost all cases it is only a matter of time and skill to also include an ASLR bypass. Both requirements continue being lowered by LLM agents every few weeks. It is only a matter of time (and probably not a lot of time) until a fully weaponized exploit is developed. It may be published, it may also be kept private.

It is straight up wrong to say "if you have ASLR enabled, you're not at any risk from this" and saying this is extremely harmful for anyone that trusts claims like that.

This wrong belief that you shouldn't care about security vulnerabilities because mitigations may make exploitation more difficult has already caused so much harm in the past. Be glad that modern mitigations exist, but patch your stuff asap. If you are a vendor, do not treat vulnerability reports as invalid because the researcher has not provided an ASLR bypass. Fix the root cause and hope mitigations buy you enough time to patch before you get owned.


Replies

krotoday at 7:20 PM

No remotely reachable vuln should be taken lightly.

At the moment though, the preconditions look odd. I've been using nginx in various constellations for 10 years and never once combined rewrite and set.

embedding-shapetoday at 6:21 PM

> and saying this is extremely harmful for anyone that trusts claims like that.

Kind of feels like the burden is on the one who is reading it though, good luck stopping people from spreading misinformation on the internet, most of them don't even know they're wrong.

What's extremely harmful is trusting random internet comments stating stuff confidently. Get good at seeing through that, and it'll serve you well in security and beyond.