Leveraging LD_AUDIT to Beat the Traditional Linux Library Preloading Technique

Published: 13 October 2020
Tags: c, security

Windows gets a lot of crap (*cough* neckbeards *cough*) for being a breeding cesspool of vulnerabilities and their respective viruses, but Linux has its own vulnerabilities too. What are these you ask? Well Lior Ribak has written an interesting article that explores on such vulnerability. Lior discusses how using an uncommon 'feature of the dynamic linker/loader' to force all ' dynamic executables in [the] environment' to load a shared library can be defended against by another similar feature, that can be forced to load even earlier. Lior also goes into the offensive uses.

The Surprising Impact of Medium-Size Texts on PostgreSQL Performance

Published: 20 October 2020
Tags: postgres, optimization

When you're talking about Postgres databases, TOAST is an acronym for the system that handles when "large field values are compressed and/or broken up into multiple physical rows", so that they can be stored across Postgres' 8 kB pages. In this in depth article, Haki Benita first explains how TOAST works, then demonstrates it in action, and finally ties it back to the titular problem, with possible solutions thrown in at the end.

What every programmer should know about memory, Part 1

Published: 21 September 2007
Tags: memory

The substantial advances in hardware have really spoiled modern programmers in terms of the resources they have available to them. As a result, most modern programs operate at a resource efficiency level that is pathetic compared to what was necessary 20, 30, or 40 years ago. Although Ulrich Drepper's article is old, the concepts it covers in relation to RAM and CPU interaction are timeless. Ulrich dives into the details of operating frequencies, data transmission, and nontrivial limitations.

Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List

Published: 5 February 2005
Tags: historical