{"id":245528,"date":"2026-10-17T01:23:51","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T06:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/researchers-demonstrate-openbsd-root-exploit-chaining-37-year-old-shared-memory-bug"},"modified":"2026-10-17T01:23:51","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T06:23:51","slug":"researchers-demonstrate-openbsd-root-exploit-chaining-37-year-old-shared-memory-bug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/researchers-demonstrate-openbsd-root-exploit-chaining-37-year-old-shared-memory-bug","title":{"rendered":"Researchers Demonstrate OpenBSD Root Exploit Chaining 37-Year-Old Shared-Memory Bug"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/7FO_6nwNCCs?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>A local privilege escalation exploit published today gains root on OpenBSD 7.9 by chaining a roughly 37-year-old integer overflow with a separate kernel flaw, bypassing OpenBSD\u2019s KARL kernel-address randomization and its SMAP and SMEP hardware protections. Security firm Calif, which found and reported the flaws, published a <a href=\"https:\/\/calif.io\/research\/big-fish\">detailed writeup<\/a> and full proof-of-concept code after OpenBSD shipped patches for both issues in September.<\/p>\n<p>The integer overflow in the shmat attach function was fixed in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.openbsd.org\/errata79.html\">errata 018<\/a>, shipped September 14 as a reliability fix. The reference-counting use-after-free that completes the chain was fixed separately in errata 26, shipped September 30 as a security fix.<\/p>\n<p>Both are available through syspatch and cover all architectures. OpenBSD 7.8 also received the integer-overflow fix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A local privilege escalation exploit published today gains root on OpenBSD 7.9 by chaining a roughly 37-year-old integer overflow with a separate kernel flaw, bypassing OpenBSD\u2019s KARL kernel-address randomization and its SMAP and SMEP hardware protections. Security firm Calif, which found and reported the flaws, published a detailed writeup and full proof-of-concept code after OpenBSD [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1492],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}