[7417] in bugtraq
Re: EMERGENCY: new remote root exploit in UW imapd
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (D. J. Bernstein)
Tue Jul 28 14:19:55 1998
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1998 10:18:36 -0000
Reply-To: "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@CR.YP.TO>
From: "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@CR.YP.TO>
To: BUGTRAQ@NETSPACE.ORG
Beware of the Dijkstra phenomenon.
The phenomenon is that immodular code seems more ``productive'' than
heavily modularized code. You can read or write many more lines per hour
of malloc(), strcpy(), free() than of unfamiliar high-level routines.
Of course, the modular code ends up being _much_ smaller. It also lets
you independently check the correctness of each module; this scales to
arbitrarily large systems if the modules remain small.
Adam Shostack writes:
> we attempted to look at the qmail source. (.89 or .91 or so).
Things have changed since then. For example, I documented most of the
Sub-Standard C Library(tm) in 1997.
> We were rarely sure when the code segments we were looking at
> were considered security critical.
Anything touching the user's mail is security-critical---maybe not from
root's point of view, but certainly from the user's point of view.
---Dan
Binary qmail distributions are allowed! http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail/dist.html
