bashing your head against nation-state social engineering

[Subrosa.io]

I think this vulnerability should have been discovered with any kind of basic fuzzing. I have little doubt that this has been discovered and has been exploited in the wild. 

How is Mirage OS promising and relevant here?

---- On Sat, 27 Sep 2014 14:48:24 -0400 Travis Biehn wrote ---- 
>From: Travis Biehn <tbiehn at gmail.com>
>To: Lodewijk andré de la porte <l at odewijk.nl>
>Cc: "cypherpunks at cpunks.org" <cypherpunks at cpunks.org>
>Subject: 
>Message-ID:
>    <CAKtE3zcZ9LuBKvJnFm_RJ3te=MotchXXDioJa17291uHUvFJFg at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
>I'm partial to Joanna Rutkowska's statement that "Security by Isolation" is
>the best course followed for -users- of software. [in addition to all the
>patching and whatever.]
>
>Developers of that software, ultimately, are responsible for securing their
>stuff. As an aside - separating your complex system into multiple trust
>zones, from a development standpoint, is de-rigueur for secure design.
>
>Security heads have long been decrying cgi-bin. Most of the reason is that
>the threat surface is insane - for binaries you have user input that's not
>running in some sort of VM [php,perl,ruby,node.js, etc] and existing in
>memory entangled with executable instructions.
>
>Injection attacks, are, of course old-hat. The daemons could have done some
>hand-holding in this respect before passing off headers to ENV variables.
>
>The issue is that 'restricted chars' wasn't defined by a standard interface
>between daemon and cgi-bin script. The called function has a completely
>arbitrary set of restricted chars.
>/bin/bash, of course, isn't written to withstand env attacks - since the
>calling user controls the env / and bash is executed under that user's
>privileges.
>So it is, of a matter of course, inevitable to find vulnerability there.
>With one process isolating the client from the env, modifying the env as a
>result of the user's whims and then passing off to a sub-process that
>trusts the env implicitly.
>
>It is very unlikely that any TLA 'created' this vulnerability. The notion
>is entirely incredible. The existence of vulnerability in such a design is
>immediately obvious from anyone who takes more than a cursory look at it.
>That isn't to say that this specific attack was trivial to identify - that
>is to say from an architecture standpoint it should be evident that the
>handoff between httpd and cgi-bin is a location of extreme vulnerability.
>
>On a related note: Mirage OS looks like it's on a promising tack:
>http://www.xenproject.org/developers/teams/mirage-os.html
>
>-Travis
>
>On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 12:49 PM, Lodewijk andré de la porte <l at odewijk.nl>
>wrote:
>
>> Know what you code, and what you run. Don't be fooled by words and shapes,
>> code does what code does, that is all.
>>
>> We seriously need a way to detach code from mental models to expose hidden
>> features. Basically, all computer law is rubbish because everything you run
>> on your computer, exploits and all, is something you run by choice. But
>> there's no way you could validate the sheer bulk of code. If you want to
>> really solve security flaws it'll involve somehow validating the
>> possibilities of the code run.
>>
>> It's a discipline that touches on visualization, automated testing and
>> simplification. Simplification meaning, reducing possible states and
>> "execution paths". And just making code easier to comprehend.
>>
>> The problem is that there's either no market for "truly secure" computing,
>> or there's just nobody filling the gap. Banks with their Cobol are laughed
>> at, mostly, and accused of lacking innovation. They do lack innovation in
>> the technical field. And Cobol is definitely not an ideal language. But
>> "truly secure" is worth a lot to them. L4 validated is a step in the right
>> direction, but catches a lot of wind saying it's still imperfect and
>> therefore worthless.
>>
>> I'm utterly bored by code review. Maybe it'd be better if there were some
>> nicer tools to help out. I'm really sure someone has great recommendations
>> regarding this. (That don't even require Cobol :)
>>
>
>
>
>-- 
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