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Earlier today I wrote a post about "security problems that C causes" and neglected to mention the use of null-terminated strings instead of a proper data structure that encapsulates length along with the string.

Well, this is what happens when you assume some sort of special data is valid, when it isn't actually. (\0 can appear in a string, it's a perfectly valid character, so it's not safe to use it to terminate the string. But people do anyway.)



While null-terminated strings aren't helping matters, the meat of the problem is much worse:

Effectively, they're using strcmp with memcpy on the same data -- it's just ridiculously stupid.


Wasn't it a similar bug that facilitated the first successful software-only Wii cracking attempt?


I actually thought about mentioning that...

All software (code+data) on the Wii must be signed, but the code burned into the supervisor chip does a strcmp on the raw binary signature. It's pretty trivial to generate a hash collision when you can force only the first byte to be compared :)


Yes.




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