On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 11:54 AM, Merlijn van Deenvalhallasw@arctus.nl wrote:
I would not be too certain about that. For example, buffer overflows are generally only a security problem when they happen in suid-root programs - this is why programs designed to be suid root have thorough checks on such problems. Software designed to be used by root does not always have the same thoroughness of checks - and running such software via sudo could expose these errors as security problems.
Any widely-used software with a known buffer overflow gets fixed. This is just as true for shutdown as for ping. You're far *more* likely to find a serious vulnerability in the kernel or services that run as root, just because of their vastly greater LOC. A user who was dedicated enough to try finding a buffer overflow in kill (which is only 16K compiled on nightshade, BTW, and I doubt it's often been changed) could save himself some effort by just waiting for a kernel privilege escalation vulnerability announcement and pulling a zero-day exploit.