Re: looking for recursion stack overflow exploit

Thanks for the suggestions on possible uses of recursion stack overflow.

FYI, the reason I ask is because I discovered an unexpectedly easy way to cause arbitrarily deep recursion in a piece of very commonly-deployed software. If ANYONE could point out to me any example of recursion stack overflow leading to remote execution, I'd dig a lot harder.

At this point, nobody has identified a known exploit like this, but the idea of overflows among thread stacks is getting close -- if thread stack environments are really unsafe enough.

So: How safe are the threads implementations on common platforms? It looks like Unix threaded web servers typically use POSIX threads. (Of course, most Unix web servers are pre-forked non-threaded Apache 1.x.) I assume the Windows threaded web servers use native threads, perhaps through a POSIX glue library.

That's the next thing I'll be looking at. If anybody knows already, information would be welcome.

If it turns out that recusion stack overflows in any or all of these thread implementations spill over onto the execution environment of other threads, then, well -- this may be easier to exploit than you think.

Keep those cards a letters coming.
Thanks.

Do you need help?

In addition to our free technical library, Pantek provides professional IT services to companies who utilize Open Source software: Learn more about Pantek's Technical Support offerings Place an order for 24/7/365 Technical Support here Learn more about Pantek, who we are, and what we do Chat with a Live Operator Related securityfocus.com Links bugtraq certification focus-bsd focus-ids focus-ih focus-linux focus-ms focus-sun focus-unix-other focus-virus forensics incidents libnet linux-secnews ms-secnews pen-test secpapers secprog sectools secureshell security-basics securityjobs sf-news vuln-dev webappsec Request more information about Pantek

Liudvikas Bukys
bukys@cs.rochester.edu Received on Mon Nov 25 14:38:15 2002