FWIS3

The Ping of Death returns on FreeBSD:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/attacker ... 9297.shtml

According to the research team, if an attacker sends a ping to our FreeBSD box but creates a malicious packet with an SCTP header of a different size than 12 bytes, it offsets values inside the operating system's computations, causing a kernel panic, which resets the machine. This is a DoS (Denial of Service) attack and is often employed with other exploits to break into vulnerable machines.

Not sure about the rest of the kernel, but holy cow, that's a horrific lack of exception handling right there.

Meh, seems to be the new normal

Look at the latest UDP mess with the Linux Kernel


https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.c ... -2015-5364
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.c ... -2015-5366

@Sigma

Those are nasty, but IMO - at least from how I read it - not as nasty. More complicated cause, fancier exploit. Whereas the BSD one is basing offsets on possibly bogus data from a completely untrusted source, which is just plain bonkers.

I'll agree that modern OS security leaves a lot to be desired, though.

Oh I'm not saying those bugs in the Linux Kernel are worse. Just that it seems the new normal. Remember one thing, software is one of the few things done at a large scale that's still requires a lot of work by hand. No matter how many abstraction layers you dump on it. There's still plenty of places to screw up. As a matter of fact I think it gets worse the more layers you have. Since BSD is less used than Linux, it probably has a lot more dirty corners. Like the Mac users that used to proudly point that they didn't have to worry about Malware because OS/X was better than Windows. And nowadays they discover that Apple is just as bad as Microsoft when it comes to bugs and fixing them.

Sort of explains why Linus Torvalds has such a short fuse

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kern ... 02866.html

Methinks Torvalds went to the Buddy Rich School of Management.

He doesn't like shiny functions?

@grapes, see here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Rich#The_Bus_Tapes

Torvalds' style seems kind of similar.