Researchers show they can beat address space layout randomization with Javascript in a browser (!)

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/15/researchers-show-they-can-beat.html

This gives me hope for breaking out of this holographically simulated universe.

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I don’t understand why an OS would allow a userspace application read access to memory addresses not assigned to a userspace application.

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It doesn’t. The paper is describing a method by which you can figure out which randomly assigned portion of the address space you got, by doing a timing attack on the MMU.

By itself this is useless. The point is that the reason people are doing address space randomization in the first place is to make exploiting security flaws such as buffer overflows more difficult.

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My life, every week.

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Yet another reason why each website needs to explicitly ask permission to run client javascript, or else be charged with unauthorized access.

It has always been naive to let the host rather than the visitor navigate the visitor’s session, but even now people will argue that “all the kewl kids are doing it”. Sure, better practices would break the web - but only if you are resigned to running a shitty web.

This is how I explain computer problems to my cat. My cat usually seems happier than me.

Annoyingly apt; I can’t get the alt-text to work. I mostly just type raw HTML into forums, but that doesn’t seem to reliably work in discourse…

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