Re: RFC: Adding a SECURITY.md document to the Binutils

Richard Earnshaw via Gdb
2023-04-13T15:06:34Z

On 13/04/2023 16:02, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
> On 2023-04-13 10:50, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
>> No, whilst elf can be executed, objdump should never be doing that:
>> it's a tool for examining a file, not running it.  You have to have a
>> tool that can safely examine the contents of an elf file or you can
>> never verify it for issues - opening it up in emacs to examine the
>> contents is not the way to do that :)
>
> You can verify it for issues, in a sandbox.

Maybe. But not always, it might not crash the program, but still lead
to issues once taken outside of the sandbox.

>
>> But all that is beside the point.  The original case I gave was a
>> /corrupt/ elf file that caused a buffer overrun in the objdump binary.
>
> ... and that's a robustness issue.  Any buffer overrun in any program
> could in theory be exploited to send out files.
>

So what's your point? These /are/ vulnerabilities in the program and
need to be considered security issues.

R.