Memcached has a crash-me bug, but hey, only about 83,000 public-facing servers appear to be running it

An annoying security flaw been disclosed and promptly fixed in the fairly popular memcached distributed data-caching software. On Monday morning a netizen with the handle IceJi publicly revealed the presence of that could be exploited to crash the software: specifically, the flaw is a buffer-overflow in the binary protocol …

[A Non e-mouse]

It seems 1.6 is the bleeding edge for Memcached so I'd have thought fewer people would be affected.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in this devops, CI/CD containerised world, where the latest shiny is preferred.

[Anonymous Coward]

preferred? I would have said 'demanded'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Article heading says "{* SECURITY *}".....but.....

.....what happened to "{* TESTING *}" ???

*

Ah.....sorry....forgot about Scrum, Agile, DevOps......."Testing" is so last century!

[Michael Wojcik]

Typical

Tainted data used as the length argument to memcpy. That's not even a mistake; it's laziness, pure and simple.

Of course even in this code snippet we have C code written by someone who doesn't know that sizeof is an operator, not a function, and its argument does not need to be parenthesized unless it's a type name.

Most developers simply don't have the discipline to write in C.

And an unconstrained overflow of an automatic-storage-class¹ very likely is an RCE vulnerability on popular platforms. It's the classic RCE, going back to Levi and to Morris before him.

¹"Stack", though C does not require a traditional contiguous stack, and the language does not use that term.