[wellylug] Critical Linux secrity hole, bad news & good news.

[David Antliff]

Simon Antliff wrote:
> On 5/5/06, Brent Wood <> wrote:
>> Critical flaws do happen, but fixes are quick :-)
> 
> The article says a missing closing parenthesis was to blame. Surely
> the opening parenthesis would be missing too? I dont know of a
> language that lets you get away with unbalanced syntax.

No, it was a case of a missing '()' on a function call, thereby using 
the value of the function pointer, rather than the return value of the 
function (i.e. it wasn't called). I can't recall the exact code but it 
was something like:

if (.... || geteuid == 0) ...

Of course that should have been:

if (.... || geteuid() == 0) ...

And function pointers compared to zero rather than NULL should throw a C 
compiler warning... another good reason for requiring clean compiles.

-- 
David.