Local attacker
Important detail
as i said on reddit
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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I replied to another comment with this, but Debian 12(stable, bookworm) and 13(testing, trixie) are affected by this but 12(stable, bookworm) has a patch out in the security repo.
If you wanna know wether or not you’re affected,
apt list libc
will show your version and the one you want is 2.36-9+deb12u4
If you don’t have that,
apt update && apt upgrade
will straighten you out
13(testing, trixie) has 2.37, but it’s not fixed yet.
E: Edited to use apt list instead of apt show.
glibc is great, but holy shit the source code is obscured into oblivion, so hard to understand, with hardcoded optimizations, and compiler optimizations. I understand how difficult is to find vulnerabilities. A bit sad that the only C lib truely free software is so hard to actually read its code or even contribute to it.
For what it's worth, glibc is very much performance-critical, so this shouldn't be a surprise. Any possible optimization is worth it.
There are a ton of free software libc implementations outside of glibc. I think most implementations of libc are free software at this point. There's Bionic, the BSD libcs, musl, the Haiku libc, the OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana libc, Newlib, relibc, the ToaruOS libc, the SerenityOS libc and a bunch more. Pretty sure Wine/ReactOS also have free implementations of the Windows libc.
Glibc has extensions that fragment compatibility. If Glibc is replaced by another libc, some apps prints an error, or don't work. I noticed that on Alpine.
Eventually it’ll be easier to create a compatible drop-in replacement than maintain the decades old code, if it isn’t already
Like what's happening to X. Wayland is replacing it.
Wayland is not a drop-in replacement tho. It's like if glibc developers declared it obsolete and presented a "replacement" that has a completely different API and has 1/100 of glibc functionality and a plugin interface. And then all the dozens of Linux distros have to write all the plugins from scratch to add back missing functionality and do it together in perfect cooperation so that they remain compatible with each other.
Unlikely, unless you drop backwards compatibility for undefined behaviour. Unless you write a complete specification on it, you'll end up either breaking old stuff, or slowly rebuilding the same problems.
Imagine all the vulnerabilities that privative and low reviewed code has...
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