Re: Task emulation vectors
Re: Task emulation vectors
- Subject: Re: Task emulation vectors
- From: Mo McRoberts <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:38:55 +0100
Hi Alexei,
Many thanks for the pointer (no pun intended).
A Google search for "Mac OS X system call emulation" leads to
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301327 ("About the
security content of the Mac OS X 10.3.9 Update"):
"The kernel contains syscall emulation functionality that is not
used in Mac OS X. Insufficient validation of an input parameter
list could result in a heap overflow and a local denial of service
through a kernel panic. The issue is addressed by removing the
syscall emulation functionality."
I'm not entirely sure how I missed that! I possibly focussed too much
on Darwin/XNU rather than Mac OS X, though. Lesson learned for the
future, I think.
Glancing at the Darwin sources confirm that the syscall emulation
code was removed between 10.3.8 and 10.3.9.
That's a bit of a shame, really. Strikes me somewhat as akin to
amputating an arm because a little finger's been broken, but then
ours is not to reason why. If it was removed as late on as that,
though, it does raise the possibility of a (fixed) patchset against
XNU -current based on the code from Panther, but there's probably not
a lot of mileage in that—unless running Linux binaries on Mac OS X
suddenly becomes the next big thing (mind you, current Oracle or DB2
on Mac OS X would be very interesting—but user-space syscall
emulation would have too much of a performance hit for it to work in
production).
Mo.
--
mo mcroberts :: email@hidden :: http://nevali.net
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Darwin-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden