Vulnerability Development mailing list archives

Re: Core Dump as an Intrusion Event


From: "W. Reilly Cooley" <wcooley () WIREX COM>
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 10:21:03 -0700

On Thu, Oct 05, 2000 at 07:00:15AM -0700, Crispin Cowan wrote:

Anyone have practical comments on this hypothesis?  In practice, how
often do services dump core for non-security reasons?  If services dump
core for non-security reasons even just a little, then the
false-positive rate of intrusion detection from this clue gets out of
control.

Aside from Netscape, not very often.  I think it's still worth knowing,
especially on servers, even in the case that it's not a likely intrusion.
FWIW, the FreeBSD 2.2 kernel logs this kind of information, and my log
checker sends it to me (since it logs at facility 'kernel').

Caveat:  I know that this is a bad heuristic for Windows machines :-)

Wil
--
W. Reilly Cooley, Esq.                 wcooley () wirex com


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