Friday, March 27, 2009

Sun Java JRE Pack200 bugs

A friend of mine, Rich Cannings, spotted my name in a Sun security advisory so I guess this means my Pack200 crashes are fixed:

http://scary.beasts.org/security/CESA-2009-005.html

This bug continues a trend of looking to native code parsers within the JRE, in order to break out of it. The most obvious application is to take over desktops via evil applets which abuse these bugs to cause memory corruptions.

The individual bugs themselves are pretty lame insofar as they are under-researched with a bit of dumb fuzzing. I was simply testing the general area for robustness, and found trouble. Other people have hit the same area, through iDefense, in the past couple of JRE updates -- hopefully they did a better job than me.

The interesting point is that researchers seem to have gotten the point regarding native code in the JRE. I've hit areas such as 2D graphics; ICC parsing and now Pack200 parsing. Others have hit GIF parsers and the font parsing. Aside from well-tested native code (jpeglib, zlib, libpng), and more of the same (e.g. a lot of font / 2D medialib code!), what's left? com.sun.media.sound? sun.java2d? Have at it :)

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