Does anybody know the origin story of the beep bug (CVE-2018-0492)? How was it discovered?
@Kensan I'm surprised it didn't have a security hole found in it earlier. It's had segfaults fixed in its before.
@Kensan impressive that they found an exploitable race involving signals though, rather than some garden-variety buffer overflow
@joeyh I am just wondering about the story behind it’s discovery because I doubt somebody was actively looking into beep... but if they were then I would imagine the why would be interesting as well :)
@Kensan not uncommon for people to look over suid programs
often a well-targeted grep across a bunch of software can find you a security hole, for example see https://blog.steve.fi/finding_and_reporting_trivial_security_issues.html
@joeyh Ah yes, suid raises attention.