News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on A buffer overflow in the XNU kernel. Parent comment

Re:A buffer overflow in the XNU kernel by axoltl on Thursday June 20, 2024 @05:25PM (#40743571)
You're either being sarcastic or wildly underestimating how hard it is to write an exploit. I haven't written about exploit dev publicly for a _long_ time, but I invite you to read https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2014/hubcap-chromecast-root-pt... for what I consider to be a pretty trivial exploit of a very "squishy" (industry term) target.

XNU isn't the hardest target to pop but it is far from the easiest.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A buffer overflow in the XNU kernel by poincaredisk on Friday June 21, 2024 @01:20AM (#40746401)
There's nobody more confident in the world, than HN poster wiring about a topic they have no experience with.

There is a huge gap (in the binary exploitation world) between identifying a problematic code pattern and having a workable bug (a reproduction), and even larger one between a reproducible crash and a working exploit (because we're not in the 90s anymore and complier/hardware mitigations are literally always enabled). Current LLMs can cross neither gap, and are not even close to bridging the second one.

[ Parent | on HN ]