Hopefully a wake-up call to those who believe older distro LTS kernels are getting all the security fixes Canonical and Redhat would want you to believe.
Also leaving a massive gap like this behind would be a mistake on multiple levels. For example, it might get combined with another exploit that can achieve unprivileged access to some piece of metal, or you can have a disgruntled employee without admin access escalating their permissions on a box they aren't supposed to see all the secrets.
Yeah. TFA mentions datacenters in 330 cities. That's a lot of Linux boxen. And many of those have, by definition, ports opened to the big bad Internet. These Linux servers are running services. They answer to ping, for a start. I even heard some are running DNS servers. Remote local exploits are a thing.
What does CloudFlare prefer: that when the next remote local exploit surface all their fleet is one copy.fail away from privilege escalation to root or that they get the time (seen that they obviously have quite advanced detection measures in place) to detect the intruder before it gains root everywhere?
It's Linux. It's datacenters in 330 cities. Linux powers the world and that's how things works.
I, for one, I'm glad to own CloudFlare stocks since right after the 2022 crash and, for two, I'm happy they don't let their huge fleet of Linux servers with a non-patched exploit.
I'm asking because I don't think they have such an exposure.
> One of the first things our security team did was confirm that our existing endpoint detection would catch this exploit. Our servers run behavioral detection that continuously monitors process execution patterns. It doesn't rely on knowing about specific vulnerabilities; it watches for anomalous behavior across the fleet.
I have a fileless, execless copyfail exploit that works by injecting shellcode directly into systemd's pid 1. (I should probably publish it at some point...)
There's no reason the task should even be assumed to be executing code in a file. A process can map code into anonymous memory and continue executing there without even branching. Again this is considered a feature of the system rather than a flaw.
In a serious environment you'd run IPE with dm-verity/fs-verity to ensure binaries are whitelisted and integrity-checked at every execution.
* Get list of modules from Puppet's facts, confirm module isn't used anywhere (it wasn't) * `install algif_aead /bin/false` in /etc/modprobe.d/disable-algif.conf * Run a check using exploit code to check it is no longer working
I imagine CF runs more stuff that could use it I guess but apparently it's not often used API
CopyFail only highlights why Companies want LTS. If there was a supported kernel built prior to 2017, most large companies would still be on that version, avoiding this issue all-together.
The corporate mindset is usually "never upgrade unless there is new hardware needed or critical software failure". All CopyFail did was reinforce that mindset.
I wonder if CopyFail will cause enterprises put pressure on the Linux Foundation to maintain a "ultra LTS" were it is supported for 20 years ?
Sadly not really how it works for say Red Hat. They routinely backport features while keeping whatever "stable" number on kernel. We even had displeasure of them backporting a bug... same bug to 2 different RHEL versions
Although given the tendency for end point logging agents to run on buffers to reduce their network chattiness I do wonder if a fast acting exploit could dump that buffer before it manages to be transmitted.
I don't think any of the agents are complex enough to immediately transmit permission elevation log messages over the regular background noise.
I'd like to know what those distinctive traces are, which is also missing :(
for whatever reason, unknown to me, hn automatically strips "how" from the start of titles. i cant remember ever seeing a title where this was an improvement.
Before: Teens break record for world's longest kickball game
After: Teens break record for longest kickball game
"China opens world's longest undersea tunnel"
vs
"China opens longest undersea tunnel"
It's a little unclear if it's the longest undersea tunnel in the world, or just in China
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48018715 "How do I inform Windows that I’m writing a binary file?"
I wonder if it ending in a '?' has anything to do with it?
edit: Upon review, at the time of posting it was actually on the 2nd page
Titles are standard clickbait.
I do think this would genuinely be useful.
The fact that LLMs usually generate anodyne summaries is actualy a benefit here.
I used my website-to-markdown tool[0] to get the text, piped the output to claude -p and got a pretty decent "Patching Copy Fail at scale: how bpf-lsm bought us time before the kernel reboot" result.
HN already editorializes the title, to help everyone other than the OP (not all people agree over what's interesting to them). Now we're just arguing over the degree.
That could be as low as 50.1%, I wish they'd provide an actual percentage.