alt Hacker NewsData-only attacks are easier than you think (2024)
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> Data-only attacks, those that do not affect a program’s control flow, have long been considered too sophisticated and niche to pose a practical threat.
Leveraging user data to get malicious behavior is the basis of interpreter eval injection (php, js, perl, shell calls, SQL ...). These attacks are like 50 years old. What do I miss?
> The attack effectively modifies only the arguments of the execve syscall
I feel this checklist of shell-tools [0] is relevant, although the focus is more on how setuid is dangerous because you might not know the fancier arguments someone could supply.
> GTFOBins is a curated list of Unix-like executables that can be used to bypass local security restrictions in misconfigured systems.
> Data-only attacks ... have long been considered too sophisticated and niche to pose a practical threat.
I thought the whole point of fuzzing was an example of finding data-only attacks.
This showed me that taint analysis is kind of slept on. Maybe we should invest in better tooling that allows us to reverse engineer with taint analysis easier. Do we think it is a UI problem? Of course over tainting is a thing, but maybe we can make it work with better UI.
I'm missing a critical part of the explanation.
If "the server has a memory safety bug that allows a malicious client to overflow some buffer and overwrite, for instance, the contents of the cgi_bin_path variable", then why is this a data-only attack? Instill need to overflow a buffer the "traditional" way.
Is this article saying that this AI tool has found 944 NEW unpatched exploits in nginx, and a comparable number in other commonly used server software?
Total 944
Table 2: Confirmed exploits for nginx.I'm positively surprised that their tool is not yet another LLM wrapper.
The quality of research (and by extent HN submissions) has really plummeted since LLMs have become marginally useful
Well, with all the enshitified complex file formats out there, I bet this is a "piece of cake" (for the people of the field with good tooling) to find exploits in the state management of code dealing with them. And very high computer languages/specialized script languages won't protect anything as those are "logic errors". I think "closing" state machines on such complex file formats is just pointless, better design new file formats from the ground up, but this time with a much stronger focus on robustness (keep that state machine as small and simple as possible and super rigorously well defined, and I mean like maths maniacs). And it is hard: because the purpose of the file format must come AFTER the robustness, namely tough compromise on the purpose itself may have to be done.
Data-only attacks are somewhat low-hanging fruit. Classical static analysis could already find them before AI got this strong, and LLMs make identification even easier. But the real threat is risk buried in business logic, especially abuse of normal business logic. Take e-commerce refund abuse. Bug hunters would not even call it a risk, yet fraud rings have arbitraged millions off this kind of logic. And because the logic is legitimate business logic, it is very hard to detect.