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

Paul Koning via Gdb
2023-04-13T15:08:59Z

> On Apr 13, 2023, at 11:02 AM, Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh@gotplt.org> 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.
>
>> 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.

No. Buffer overruns are generally recognized as security issues, precisely because they (often) can be used to produce arbitrary code execution exploits.

A buiffer overrun would be merely a robustness issue if it is guaranteed to cause nothing worse than a program abort.

paul