Debian DSA-3480-1 : eglibc - security update

critical Nessus Plugin ID 88767

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Synopsis

The remote Debian host is missing a security-related update.

Description

Several vulnerabilities have been fixed in the GNU C Library, eglibc.

The CVE-2015-7547 vulnerability listed below is considered to have critical impact.

- CVE-2014-8121 Robin Hack discovered that the nss_files database did not correctly implement enumeration interleaved with name-based or ID-based lookups. This could cause the enumeration enter an endless loop, leading to a denial of service.

- CVE-2015-1781 Arjun Shankar discovered that the _r variants of host name resolution functions (like gethostbyname_r), when performing DNS name resolution, suffered from a buffer overflow if a misaligned buffer was supplied by the applications, leading to a crash or, potentially, arbitrary code execution. Most applications are not affected by this vulnerability because they use aligned buffers.

- CVE-2015-7547 The Google Security Team and Red Hat discovered that the eglibc host name resolver function, getaddrinfo, when processing AF_UNSPEC queries (for dual A/AAAA lookups), could mismanage its internal buffers, leading to a stack-based buffer overflow and arbitrary code execution. This vulnerability affects most applications which perform host name resolution using getaddrinfo, including system services.

- CVE-2015-8776 Adam Nielsen discovered that if an invalid separated time value is passed to strftime, the strftime function could crash or leak information. Applications normally pass only valid time information to strftime; no affected applications are known.

- CVE-2015-8777 Hector Marco-Gisbert reported that LD_POINTER_GUARD was not ignored for SUID programs, enabling an unintended bypass of a security feature. This update causes eglibc to always ignore the LD_POINTER_GUARD environment variable.

- CVE-2015-8778 Szabolcs Nagy reported that the rarely-used hcreate and hcreate_r functions did not check the size argument properly, leading to a crash (denial of service) for certain arguments. No impacted applications are known at this time.

- CVE-2015-8779 The catopen function contains several unbound stack allocations (stack overflows), causing it the crash the process (denial of service). No applications where this issue has a security impact are currently known.

The following fixed vulnerabilities currently lack CVE assignment :

- Joseph Myers reported that an integer overflow in the strxfrm can lead to heap-based buffer overflow, possibly allowing arbitrary code execution. In addition, a fallback path in strxfrm uses an unbounded stack allocation (stack overflow), leading to a crash or erroneous application behavior.
- Kostya Serebryany reported that the fnmatch function could skip over the terminating NUL character of a malformed pattern, causing an application calling fnmatch to crash (denial of service).

- Joseph Myers reported that the IO_wstr_overflow function, internally used by wide-oriented character streams, suffered from an integer overflow, leading to a heap-based buffer overflow. On GNU/Linux systems, wide-oriented character streams are rarely used, and no affected applications are known.

- Andreas Schwab reported a memory leak (memory allocation without a matching deallocation) while processing certain DNS answers in getaddrinfo, related to the
_nss_dns_gethostbyname4_r function. This vulnerability could lead to a denial of service.

While it is only necessary to ensure that all processes are not using the old eglibc anymore, it is recommended to reboot the machines after applying the security upgrade.

Solution

Upgrade the eglibc packages.

For the oldstable distribution (wheezy), these problems have been fixed in version 2.13-38+deb7u10.

Plugin Details

Severity: Critical

ID: 88767

File Name: debian_DSA-3480.nasl

Version: 2.17

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Debian Local Security Checks

Published: 2/17/2016

Updated: 6/18/2024

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: High

Score: 7.4

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Critical

Base Score: 10

Temporal Score: 7.8

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Critical

Base Score: 9.8

Temporal Score: 8.8

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:P/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:debian:debian_linux:7.0, p-cpe:/a:debian:debian_linux:eglibc

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/Debian/release, Host/Debian/dpkg-l

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 2/16/2016

Vulnerability Publication Date: 3/27/2015

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2014-8121, CVE-2015-1781, CVE-2015-7547, CVE-2015-8776, CVE-2015-8777, CVE-2015-8778, CVE-2015-8779

DSA: 3480

IAVA: 2016-A-0053-S

TRA: TRA-2017-08

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