How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less

Re:How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less by staycoolboy on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:46PM (#23784264)

FTA: "...the LightSpeed bug was fixed in iOS 12 with a patch that didn't address the root cause and instead just turned the race condition double-free into a memory leak. Then, in iOS 13, this memory leak was identified as a bug and "fixed" by reintroducing the original bug, again without addressing the root cause of the issue..."

Ooof. Talk about running in circles. Either this was someone who is swamped with work and spaced out, or a new programmer who wasn't familiar with the original. Oddly, I feel bad for both of them!

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Re:How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less by ehsankia on Thursday July 09, 2020 @04:43PM (#23784948)

Reguardless of how bad the original fix was, this is why testing is important. The original person should've added tests to make sure that specific issue doesn't come up again, and it would've caught the regression.

> Thus, this is another case of a reintroduced bug that could have been identified by simple regression tests.

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Re:How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less by thomaslkjeldsen on Thursday July 09, 2020 @05:31PM (#23785456)

> Talk about running in circles.

So maybe writing and reading useful commit logs is not such a bad idea after all :)

Reminds me of this quote: "Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it."

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Re:How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less by hnick on Thursday July 09, 2020 @09:23PM (#23787191)

Or comments in code. They are very useful when pointing out gotchas.

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Re:How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less by userbinator on Thursday July 09, 2020 @03:56PM (#23784381)

...or the more interesting and perhaps less plausible explanation: someone who doesn't toe the line, someone who was trying to "take down the system from within"...

I often wonder what goes through the minds of those whose work helps companies exert more control over their customers. Maybe some of them are not so "obedient" after all...

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Re:How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less by pcwalton on Thursday July 09, 2020 @04:10PM (#23784558)

Hanlon's Razor suggests otherwise. People said that the Windows Metafile bug in 2005 was a backdoor, which was obviously wrong.

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