Show a language model this piece of ASCII art, followed by the question “What is this?”: _______ / \ / ~ ~ \ ( o o ) | ^ | | | | \_____/ | \ / \_________/ | | Apart from the question itself, the prompt contains no words at all, the drawing is nothing but slashes, brackets, and underscores. Now, while the model reads the prompt, point a special instrument at its internals, right at the ^ character,…
Thread Local Storage (henceforth TLS) is pretty cool, it may appear to be simple at first glance but a good and efficient TLS implementation requires concerted effort from compiler, linker, dynamic linker, kernel, and language runtime. On Linux, an excellent treatment to this topic is Ulrich Drepper’s ELF Handling For Thread-Local Storage , this blog post is my take on the same topic but with a…
Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) is one of the most publicised local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in 2016, courtesy to its catchy name, cute logo, potential damages, and the fact that it was discovered in the wild by a researcher Phil Oester, meaning it was already under active use at the time of discovery. Introduction There have been plenty of articles and blog posts about the exploit, but none…