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Beacown (Linux WiFi Exploit)

94 points| pdenton | 3 years ago |github.com

23 comments

order

joosters|3 years ago

[x] Catchy name

[ ] Catchy logo

Poor effort, only 50% of the way there. (No marks awarded for a working exploit, marketing doesn't care about that)

Edit: Marks should also be deducted for a lack of scary text claiming that everyone should panic.

gw99|3 years ago

I think we need a vulnerability buzzword bingo.

Scaevolus|3 years ago

Some sort of evil bee/cow hybrid with psychic (wifi) waves would work well as a logo, to help generate buzz.

ncmncm|3 years ago

Just to be clear, everyone really should panic. Right?

ncmncm|3 years ago

[deleted]

kibwen|3 years ago

Even as a Rust user, I'd prefer to reduce the attack surface by having a userspace network stack. Tanenbaum gets the last laugh.

Of course, once it's in userspace you can write it in whatever language you want. But as a network-facing component, yes, it should preferably be written in a memory-safe language as much as possible, since it's extremely high-risk and the first target for remote adversaries.

phendrenad2|3 years ago

Why is this certain? Nobody has written a wifi stack, or even a single wifi driver, for Linux. Until they do, we won't know if Rust will help with these kinds of security flaws.

jwandborg|3 years ago

> promoting kernel Rust will not fix anything, howsoever personally gratifying it may feel to engage in it.

I totally agree, you'd need to fix the broken things to fix anything, hopefully without writing more broken things on your way there and back, and ideally in a way that is unambiguous and easy to parse, unlike this sentence.

pjmlp|3 years ago

It remains to be seen how the new Bluetooth stack introduced in Android 11 will get exploits.

The old one has plenty of them to show off due to typical memory corruptions handling network packets.