Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 18 submissions in the queue.
posted by chromas on Monday April 09 2018, @06:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the (unsigned⠀int) dept.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/04/microsoft_windows_defender_rar_bug/

A remote-code execution vulnerability in Windows Defender – a flaw that can be exploited by malicious .rar files to run malware on PCs – has been traced back to an open-source archiving tool Microsoft adopted for its own use.

[...] Apparently, Microsoft forked that version of unrar and incorporated the component into its operating system's antivirus engine. That forked code was then modified so that all signed integer variables were converted to unsigned variables, causing knock-on problems with mathematical comparisons. This in turn left the software vulnerable to memory corruption errors, which can crash the antivirus package or allow malicious code to potentially execute.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @05:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 10 2018, @05:39PM (#665031)

    Unrar is not released under the GPL or any other copyleft free license. It is proprietary software released under a proprietary license.

    Microsoft is likely within the permissions granted by the unrar license but this whole thing has nothing to do with any free or open source software.