{"id":176,"date":"2006-05-04T01:50:43","date_gmt":"2006-05-04T01:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/2006\/05\/homeland-security-uncovers-critical-flaw-in-x11\/"},"modified":"2010-07-21T11:31:43","modified_gmt":"2010-07-21T10:31:43","slug":"homeland-security-uncovers-critical-flaw-in-x11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/2006\/05\/homeland-security-uncovers-critical-flaw-in-x11\/","title":{"rendered":"Homeland Security Uncovers Critical Flaw in X11"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

An open-source security audit program funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has flagged a critical vulnerability in the X Window System (X11) which is used in Unix and Linux systems. A missing parentheses in a bit of code is to blame. The error can grant a user root access, and was discovered using an automated code-scanning tool.<\/p>\n

The flaw has been fixed.<\/p>\n

It was a change from this:<\/p>\n

if (getuid() == 0 || geteuid != 0)<\/code><\/p>\n

to this:<\/p>\n

if (getuid() == 0 || geteuid() != 0) <\/code><\/p>\n

The best part was the CVS comment:<\/p>\n

Fri Mar 10 17:29:51 2006 UTC (7 weeks, 4 days ago) by deraadt:<\/em>
\nproper geteuid calls because suse hires people who mistype things<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From the article:<\/p>\n

Coverity, the San Franciso-based company managing the project under a $1.25 million grant, described the flaw as the “biggest security vulnerability” found in the X Window System code since 2000.<\/p>\n

The X Window System, also called X11 or X, provides the toolkit and protocol to build GUIs for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is used to provide windowing for bit-map displays. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Source: Yahoo News<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Apparently OpenBSD already fixed this during a code-cleanup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An open-source security audit program funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has flagged a critical vulnerability in the X Window System (X11) which is used in Unix and Linux systems. A missing parentheses in a bit of code is to blame. The error can grant a user root access, and was discovered using […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,6],"tags":[38,37,295,499,411,412,450,296],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Darknet","author_link":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/author\/darknet\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darknet.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}