33-Year-Old Unix Bug Fixed In OpenBSD 162
Ste sends along the cheery little story of Otto Moerbeek, one of the OpenBSD developers, who recently found and fixed a 33-year-old buffer overflow bug in Yacc. "But if the stack is at maximum size, this will overflow if an entry on the stack is larger than the 16 bytes leeway my malloc allows. In the case of of C++ it is 24 bytes, so a SEGV occurred. Funny thing is that I traced this back to Sixth Edition UNIX, released in 1975."
Time to patch (Score:5, Funny)
From back when (Score:5, Funny)
Unix beards were Unix stubble
Re:Time to patch (Score:5, Funny)
But ./ is already taken over with yak. Seriously.
bad omen (Score:5, Funny)
a 33 year old bug, plus a 25 year old bug (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/11/1339228)....
if we keep going backwards, will the world implode? or will daemons start spewing out of cracks in time and space?
Re:Time to patch (Score:4, Funny)
Who cares about OpenBSD yacc? BSD is dying and Netcraft confirms it. The world has moved to GNU/Linux and Bison.
Re:bad omen (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:bad omen (Score:5, Funny)
a 33 year old bug, plus a 25 year old bug (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/11/1339228)....
if we keep going backwards, will the world implode?
Well since time began only 38.5 years ago we should find out the answer very soon!
Re:bad omen (Score:4, Funny)
or will daemons start spewing out of cracks in time and space?
I finally figured out what the UAC were doing on the Mars colony... and it had nothing to do with those artifacts!
Thank god there's a division of Space Marines there...
Re:bad omen (Score:5, Funny)
It's just as possible people are wasting time fixing unimportant issues and ignoring more important ones.
We're talking programmers here, not politicians...
Re:Was it really a bug back then? (Score:5, Funny)
If you overflow a buffer then it's a bug, whether it is exploitable or not.
If you can overflow an exabyte-sized memory buffer, you deserve a fucking medal.
Re:Time to patch (Score:4, Funny)
Re:bad omen (Score:3, Funny)
Well since bugs before the epoch [wikipedia.org] were actual insects, judging by past precedent they'll get super powers... like wall-climbing ability or maybe spidey senses ??
Re:bad omen (Score:5, Funny)
The next bug will be in Boolean logic. After that, OpenBSD devs will start fixing structural engineering errors the Tower of Pisa.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Burn the contents of the tar archive onto a CD. Mount the CD over the original directory structure. Use find(1)'s -fstype option to locate all the files that aren't on the CD, copy them to an empty disk image, then eject the CD. Remount the disk image over the original directory, delete all the files in the directory, then unmount the disk image. The files identical in name to those that were on the disk image (which are those that weren't on the CD) won't be deleted thanks to the peculiarities of mount(2).
You're welcome.
Re:Time to patch (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, but it would be written as a J2EE application. And the input wouldn't be .y, it'd be an XML document. And the output wouldn't be C, it'd be another XML, passing through a terabyte of XSLT. Then you pass this compiled parser XML, only a gigabyte in size, and your language file to a parser web service and it returns even more XML representing the parse tree.
Ahh, progress.
Hilarious! (Score:5, Funny)
Funny thing is that I traced this back to Sixth Edition UNIX, released in 1975
My sides are completely split! Invite this guy to more parties.
Re:Was it really a bug back then? (Score:5, Funny)
You'll get it when the buffer overflows. If you're running it on a system that processes a billion of those loops per second, that should be in a bit over 31 years. Scale accordingly for your processor and memory speed.
Re:bad omen (Score:5, Funny)
Sure. Break malloc even worse to allow for backwards compatibility.
See "Windows 95".
Re:bad omen (Score:3, Funny)
In exactly 3.5 years , but I'm afraid the answer will disappoint you.
Re:Time to patch (Score:5, Funny)
Speaking of old bugs the guy who sits next to me at work hooked a 15yo mainfame bug a few months back. His stock comment whenever someone mentions it is: "Three more years and that one would have been old enough to vote!"
Re:Great! (Score:3, Funny)
You forgot "Er.". All Linux advice must contain "Er." at the beginning of the first sentence in order to signify the fact that the poster should have already known how to do this rather than asking this question.
Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)
So Saturdays at your house must be a real blast, huh?