Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has been gaining momentum as a replacement
for RSA public key cryptography largely based on its efficiency, but also
because the US National Security Agency (NSA) included
it, while excluding RSA, from its
Suite
B cryptography recommendations. Suite B is a set of algorithms that the
NSA recommends for use in protecting both classified and unclassified
US government information and systems.
Public key cryptography is the basis for tools like ssh as well as Secure
Sockets Layer (SSL) for encrypting web traffic.
For readers who would like more information, a nice introduction to
public key
cryptography and the
RSA algorithm can be found on
Wikipedia.
ECC is based on some very deep
math
involving elliptic curves in a finite field. It relies on the difficulty
of solving the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP) in much
the same way that RSA depends on the difficulty of factoring the product
of two large primes. The best known method for solving
ECDLP is fully exponential, whereas the number field sieve (for factoring) is
sub-exponential. This allows ECC to use drastically smaller keys to provide
the equivalent security; a 160-bit ECC key is equivalent to a 1024-bit RSA key.
Smaller key sizes lead to faster processing, which is very interesting to
folks that are implementing encryption on small, mobile devices with limited
resources in terms of power, CPU and memory. It is also very desirable for
large web servers that will be handling many encrypted sessions. These are
the technical considerations driving adoption. The NSA's recommendation makes
it very attractive to companies that sell encryption products to the
government and many non-governmental entities will also want products
that implement ECC.
In order to use elliptic curves as part of a public key cryptosystem, both
parties must agree on a set of domain parameters that fully specify the curve
that is being used. Various groups, notably the US National Institute for
Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Standards for Efficient Cryptography
Group (SECG) have recommendations for the domain parameters to be used for
various key sizes. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) also has a
draft
specification for adding ECC to SSL/TLS.
Sun Microsystems has donated ECC code to OpenSSL and the Network Security
Services (NSS) library; this allows the Apache web server and Mozilla browsers
(and many other programs) to use ECC.
Unfortunately, as with RSA before its patent expired, the ECC landscape is
littered with patent claims; some of dubious enforceability due to prior
art. Sun claims patents on ECC technology, but has provided a "patent peace"
provision in its license that states that it will not enforce its patent
claims and asks that anyone holding patents associated with the code not
enforce them against Sun.
The wild card in the ECC patent arena seems to
be Certicom which claims a large number of ECC patents and has not made a
clear statement of its intentions with regard to open source implementations.
The NSA licensed Certicom's patents for $25 million to allow them and their
suppliers to use ECC, lending some credence to at least some of the
Certicom patents.
Other companies also have
patents on various
pieces of ECC technology.
As is often the case with patents, it is well nigh impossible to determine
what the patents cover and if an implementation infringes without going to
court. Ironically, the clearest description of what is and is not patented
is an RSA Laboratories
FAQ entry:
In all of these cases, it is the implementation technique that is patented,
not the prime or representation, and there are alternative, compatible
implementation techniques that are not covered by the patents.
Of course, this is not legal advice from RSA and may or may not be how it
is interpreted by the courts. We will all have to wait and see how it
plays out if one or more of the patent holders decides to sue.
[The author wishes to thank his employer,
Privacy Networks, for sending
him to the RSA 2006 conference which inspired this article.]
The bmv PostScript viewer has an integer overflow vulnerability.
If a specially crafted PostScript file is read by bmv, it may be
possible to execute arbitrary code.
Chris Moore discovered a buffer overflow in a particular class of
lexicographical scanners generated by flex. This could be exploited to
execute arbitrary code by processing specially crafted user-defined
input to an application that uses a flex scanner for parsing.
A bug was found in the way initscripts handled various environment
variables when the /sbin/service command is run. It is possible for a local
user with permissions to execute /sbin/service via sudo to execute
arbitrary commands as the 'root' user.
irssi-text has a remote denial of service vulnerability that is caused
by incomplete verification of arguments by the DCC
ACCEPT command handler. A remote attacker can crash irssi and cause
a denial of service.
The Linux kernel has multiple vulnerabilities including
a sanity check problem with sys_mbind that can lead to a local
denial of service, an ELF vulnerability that can crash
Intel EM64T systems and an NFS client panic problem that
can be triggered by direct I/O from a local user.
The WYSIWYG rendering engine in Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 and earlier
allows user-complicit attackers to bypass javascript security settings and
obtain sensitive information or cause a crash via an e-mail containing a
javascript URI in the SRC attribute of an IFRAME tag, which is executed
when the user edits the e-mail.
Patrik Karlsson reported that WordPress 1.5.2 makes use of an
insufficiently filtered User Agent string in SQL queries related to
comments posting. This vulnerability was already fixed in the 2.0-series
of WordPress.
Stack-based buffer overflow in the fullpath function in misc.c for zoo 2.10
and earlier allows user-complicit attackers to execute arbitrary code via a
crafted ZOO file that causes the combine function to return a longer string
than expected.
Andy Staudacher discovered that ADOdb does not properly sanitize all
parameters. By sending specifically crafted requests to an application
that uses ADOdb and a PostgreSQL backend, an attacker might exploit the
flaw to execute arbitrary SQL queries on the host.
Versions 1 and 2 of the apache web server suffer from a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the mod_imap module; see this bugzilla entry for details.
Damian Put discovered that Blender did not properly validate a 'length'
value in .blend files. Negative values led to an insufficiently sized
memory allocation. By tricking a user into opening a specially crafted
.blend file, this could be exploited to execute arbitrary code with the
privileges of the Blender user.
A buffer overflow in l2cap.c in hcidump allows remote attackers to cause a
denial of service (crash) through a wireless Bluetooth connection via a
malformed Logical Link Control and Adaptation Protocol (L2CAP) packet.
Stefan Cornelius of the Gentoo Security team discovered multiple
missing buffer checks in BomberClone's code. By sending overly long error
messages to the game via network, a remote attacker may exploit buffer
overflows to execute arbitrary code with the rights of the user running
BomberClone.
A race condition in bzip2 1.0.2 and earlier allows local users to modify
permissions of arbitrary files via a hard link attack on a file while it is
being decompressed, whose permissions are changed by bzip2 after the
decompression is complete. Also specially crafted bzip2 archives may cause
an infinite loop in the decompressor.
From the Debian-Testing alert: Mehdi Oudad "deepfear" and Kevin Fernandez "Siegfried" from the Zone-H
Research Team discovered a buffer overflow in kkstrtext.h of the ktools
library, which is included in (at least) centericq and motor.
Richard Harms discovered that cpio did not sufficiently validate file
properties when creating archives. Files with e. g. a very large size
caused a buffer overflow. By tricking a user or an automatic backup
system into putting a specially crafted file into a cpio archive, a
local attacker could probably exploit this to execute arbitrary code
with the privileges of the target user (which is likely root in an
automatic backup system).
The curl file transfer utility has a buffer overflow vulnerability
in the URL authentication code. If an overly long URL is used,
a buffer overflow can result, allowing for local unauthorized access.
Cyrus-imapd, prior to version 2.2.12, contains several buffer overflows which could be exploited by an (authenticated) attacker to run code on the server system.
Joxean Koret discovered that the SVG import plugin did not properly
sanitize data read from an SVG file. By tricking an user into opening
a specially crafted SVG file, an attacker could exploit this to
execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user.
Max Vozeler discovered a format string vulnerability in the "movemail"
utility of Emacs. By sending specially crafted packets, a malicious
POP3 server could cause a buffer overflow, which could be exploited to
execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user and the "mail"
group.
Erik Sjölund has discovered several security relevant problems in enscript,
a program to convert ASCII text into Postscript and other formats.
Unsanitized input can cause the execution of arbitrary commands via EPSF
pipe support. Due to missing sanitizing of filenames it is possible that a
specially crafted filename can cause arbitrary commands to be executed.
Multiple buffer overflows can cause the program to crash.
Fetchmail contains a bug which allows a malicious mail server to crash the
client by sending a message without headers. This occurs when running in
multidrop mode.
The avcodec_default_get_buffer() function of the ffmpeg library
has a buffer overflow vulnerability. A user can be tricked into
playing a maliciously created PNG movie, allowing the attacker to
run arbitrary code with the user's privileges.
There is a vulnerability in the foomatic-filters package. This
vulnerability is due to insufficient checking of command-line parameters
and environment variables in the foomatic-rip filter. This vulnerability
may allow both local and remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands on
the print server with the permissions of the spooler.
Tavis Ormandy of the Gentoo Linux Security Audit Team discovered an integer
overflow in the BFD library, resulting in a heap overflow. A review also
showed that by default, gdb insecurely sources initialization files from
the working directory. Successful exploitation would result in the
execution of arbitrary code on loading a specially crafted object file or
the execution of arbitrary commands.
The gdk-pixbuf package contains an image loading library used with the
GNOME GUI desktop environment. A bug was found in the way gdk-pixbuf
processes XPM images. An attacker could create a carefully crafted XPM file
in such a way that it could cause an application linked with gdk-pixbuf to
execute arbitrary code when the file was opened by a victim.
Ludwig Nussel discovered an integer overflow bug in the way gdk-pixbuf
processes XPM images. An attacker could create a carefully crafted XPM
file in such a way that it could cause an application linked with
gdk-pixbuf to execute arbitrary code or crash when the file was opened by a
victim.
Ludwig Nussel also discovered an infinite-loop denial of service bug in the
way gdk-pixbuf processes XPM images. An attacker could create a carefully
crafted XPM file in such a way that it could cause an application linked
with gdk-pixbuf to stop responding when the file was opened by a victim.
A format string vulnerability has been discovered in gedit. Calling
the program with specially crafted file names caused a buffer
overflow, which could be exploited to execute arbitrary code with the
privileges of the gedit user.
gettext insecurely creates temporary files in world-writeable directories
with predictable names. A local attacker could create symbolic links in
the temporary files directory, pointing to a valid file somewhere on the
filesystem. When gettext is called, this would result in file access with
the rights of the user running the utility, which could be the root user.
Tavis Ormandy noticed that gnupg, the GNU privacy guard - a free PGP
replacement, verifies external signatures of files successfully even
though they don't contain a signature at all. See this update from the gnuPG team for more
information.
Several flaws were found in the way libtasn1 decodes DER. An attacker
could create a carefully crafted invalid X.509 certificate in such a way
that could trigger this flaw if parsed by an application that uses GNU TLS.
This could lead to a denial of service (application crash). It is not
certain if this issue could be escalated to allow arbitrary code execution.
zgrep in gzip before 1.3.5 does not handle shell metacharacters like '|'
and '&' properly when they occurred in input file names. This could be
exploited to execute arbitrary commands with user privileges if zgrep is
run in an untrusted directory with specially crafted file names.
A privilege escalation flaw has been found in the heimdal rsh (remote
shell) server. This allowed an authenticated attacker to overwrite
arbitrary files and gain ownership of them.
Florian Weimer discovered that the delegate code did not correctly
handle file names which embed shell commands (CVE-2005-4601). Daniel
Kobras found a format string vulnerability in the SetImageInfo()
function (CVE-2006-0082). By tricking a user into processing an image
file with a specially crafted file name, these two vulnerabilities
could be exploited to execute arbitrary commands with the user's
privileges. These vulnerability become particularly critical if
malicious images are sent as email attachments and the email client
uses imagemagick to convert/display the images (e. g. Thunderbird and
Gnus).
A buffer overflow flaw was found in the c-client IMAP client. An attacker
could create a malicious IMAP server that if connected to by a victim could
execute arbitrary code on the client machine.
ipsec-tools has a remote
denial of service vulnerability in the racoon daemon.
If racoon is running in aggressive mode, it fails to check all peer
payloads during
When the daemon the IKE negotiation phase, allowing a malicious peer
to crash the daemon. One should always be careful around aggressive racoons.
The kdebase package (and kcheckpass in particular) found in KDE versions 3.2.0 through 3.4.2 suffers from a lock file handling error which can enable a local attacker to obtain root access. See this advisory for details.
Konqueror's kjs JavaScript interpreter engine has a heap overflow
vulnerability. Specially crafted JavaScript code could be placed on
a web site, leading to arbitrary code execution.
Other kde applications are also subject to this vulnerability.
Kate / Kwrite, as shipped with KDE 3.2.x up to including 3.4.0, creates a file backup before saving a modified file. These backup files are created with default permissions, even if the original file had more strict permissions set. See this advisory for more information.
A number of vulnerabilities have been found in the Linux kernel, including a PPP-related denial of service problem, an integer overflow in the epoll() code, memory corruption in the ELF loader, and exploitable overflows in the ISO9660 code.
Al Viro discovered a race condition in the /proc file handler of
network devices. A local attacker could exploit this by opening any
file in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/<interface>/ and waiting until that
interface was shut down. Under certain circumstances this could lead
to a kernel crash or even arbitrary code execution with full kernel
privileges. (CVE-2005-2709)
Tetsuo Handa discovered a local Denial of Service vulnerability in the
udp_v6_get_port() function. On computers which use IPv6, a local
attacker could exploit this to trigger an infinite loop in the kernel.
(CVE-2005-2973)
Harald Welte discovered a Denial of Service vulnerability in the USB
devio driver. A local attacker could exploit this by sending an "USB
Request Block" (URB) and terminating the sending process before the
arrival of the answer, which left an invalid pointer and caused a
kernel crash. (CVE-2005-3055)
Pavel Roskin discovered an information leak in the Orinoco wireless
card driver. When increasing the buffer length for storing data, the
buffer was not padded with zeros, which exposed a random part of the
system memory to the user. (CVE-2005-3180)
A resource leak has been discovered in the handling of POSIX timers in
the exec() function. This could be exploited to a Denial of Service
attack by a group of local users. (CVE-2005-3271)
Stephen Hemminger discovered a weakness in the network bridge driver.
Packets which had already been dropped by the packet filter could
poison the forwarding table, which could be exploited to make the
bridge forward spoofed packages. (CVE-2005-3272)
David S. Miller discovered a buffer overflow in the rose_rt_ioctl()
function. By calling the function with a large "ngidis" argument, a
local attacker could cause a kernel crash. (CVE-2005-3273)
Neil Horman discovered a race condition in the connection timer
handling. This allowed a local attacker to set up an expiration
handler which modified the connection list while the list still being
traversed, which could result in a kernel crash. This vulnerability
only affects multiprocessor (SMP) systems. (CVE-2005-3274)
Patrick McHardy noticed a logic error in the network address
translation (NAT) connection tracker. A remote attacker could exploit
this by causing two packets for the same protocol to be NATed at the
same time, which resulted in a kernel crash. (CVE-2005-3275)
Paolo Giarrusso discovered an information leak in the
sys_get_thread_area(). The returned structure was not properly
cleared, which exposed a small amount of kernel memory to userspace
programs. This could possibly expose confidential data.
(CVE-2005-3276)
Here's another set of vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel:
A race condition in the 2.6 kernel could allow a local user to cause a
DoS by triggering a core dump in one thread while another thread has a
pending SIGSTOP (CVE-2005-3527).
The ptrace functionality in 2.6 kernels prior to 2.6.14.2, using
CLONE_THREAD, does not use the thread group ID to check whether it is
attaching to itself, which could allow local users to cause a DoS
(CVE-2005-3783).
The auto-reap child process in 2.6 kernels prior to 2.6.15 include
processes with ptrace attached, which leads to a dangling ptrace
reference and allows local users to cause a crash (CVE-2005-3784).
A locking problem in the POSIX timer cleanup handling on exit on
kernels 2.6.10 to 2.6.14 when running on SMP systems, allows a local
user to cause a deadlock involving process CPU timers (CVE-2005-3805).
The IPv6 flowlabel handling code in 2.4 and 2.6 kernels prior to
2.4.32 and 2.6.14 modifies the wrong variable in certain circumstances,
which allows local users to corrupt kernel memory or cause a crash by
triggering a free of non-allocated memory (CVE-2005-3806).
An integer overflow in 2.6.14 and earlier could allow a local user to
cause a hang via 64-bit mmap calls that are not properly handled on a
32-bit system (CVE-2005-3808).
Another heap based buffer overflow has been
found in xpdf and other programs that share the same code. This one is
in Splash.cc and it can cause crashes and possibly arbitrary code execution.
Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña from the Debian Security Audit Project
discovered that the DBI library, the Perl5 database interface, creates
a temporary PID file in an insecure manner. This can be exploited by a
malicious user to overwrite arbitrary files owned by the person
executing the parts of the library.
Szymon Zygmunt and Michal Bartoszkiewicz discovered a memory alignment
error in libgadu (from ekg, console Gadu Gadu client, an instant
messaging program) which is included in gaim, a multi-protocol instant
messaging client, as well. This can not be exploited on the x86
architecture but on others, e.g. on Sparc and lead to a bus error,
in other words a denial of service.
Several buffer overflows have been discovered in libgd's PNG handling
functions.
If an attacker tricked a user into loading a malicious PNG image, they
could leverage this into executing arbitrary code in the context of
the user opening image. Most importantly, this library is commonly
used in PHP. One possible target would be a PHP driven photo website
that lets users upload images. Therefore this vulnerability might lead
to privilege escalation to a web server's privileges.
Multiple buffer overflows in the gd graphics library (libgd) 2.0.21 and
earlier may allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via malformed
image files that trigger the overflows due to improper calls to the
gdMalloc function.
Niko Tyni discovered that the Mail::Audit module, a Perl library for
creating simple mail filters, logs to a temporary file with a predictable
filename in an insecure fashion when logging is turned on.
libpam-ldap, the PAM LDAP interface, has a vulnerability in which
it fails to authenticate with an LDAP server which is not configured
properly, allowing an authentication bypass.
A heap based buffer overflow bug was found in the way libpng strips alpha
channels from a PNG image. An attacker could create a carefully crafted PNG
image file in such a way that it could cause an application linked with
libpng to crash or execute arbitrary code when the file is opened by a
victim.
The libungif library has a vulnerability in the GIF file
colormap handling code. A maliciously crafted GIF file can
cause out of bounds memory writing and register corruption.
Yuuichi Teranishi discovered a flaw in libxml2 versions prior to 2.6.6.
When fetching a remote resource via FTP or HTTP, libxml2 uses special
parsing routines. These routines can overflow a buffer if passed a very
long URL. If an attacker is able to find an application using libxml2 that
parses remote resources and allows them to influence the URL, then this
flaw could be used to execute arbitrary code.
libxml2 prior to version 2.6.14 has multiple buffer overflow
vulnerabilities, if a local user passes a specially crafted
FTP URL, arbitrary code may be executed.
An arbitrary command execute bug was found in the lynx "lynxcgi:" URI
handler. An attacker could create a web page redirecting to a malicious URL
which could execute arbitrary code as the user running lynx.
Scrubber.py in Mailman 2.1.4 - 2.1.6 does not properly handle UTF8
character encodings in filenames of e-mail attachments, which allows
remote attackers to cause a denial of service.
A buffer overflow bug was found in the way Metamail processes certain mail
messages. An attacker could create a carefully-crafted message such that
when it is opened by a victim and parsed through Metamail, it runs
arbitrary code as the victim.
mod_python has a vulnerability in the publisher handler that may allow
a remote user to use a specially crafted URL to allow access to
objects that should be protected. An information leak can result.
Mozilla has three new vulnerabilities.
The Javascript interpreter has a problem with
dereferencing objects. A user can visit a specially crafted web page
which can crash the browser or cause it to execute arbitrary code.
The XULDocument.persist() function has a bug that can be triggered by
viewing specially crafted web sites, RDF data can be injected into the
localstore.rdf file, allowing arbitrary javascript code to be executed.
The Mozilla history saving mechanism is vulnerable to a denial of
service attack, visiting sites with extra-long titles can cause a
crash or very slow startup the next time the browser is run.
Kurt Fitzner discovered that the NBD (network block device) server did not
correctly verify the maximum size of request packets. By sending specially
crafted large request packets, a remote attacker who is allowed to access
the server could exploit this to execute arbitrary code with root
privileges.
Erik Sjolund discovered two vulnerabilities in the programs bundled
with ncpfs: there is a potentially exploitable buffer overflow in
ncplogin (CAN-2005-0014), and due to a flaw in nwclient.c, utilities
using the NetWare client functions insecurely access files with
elevated privileges (CAN-2005-0013).
When starting xntpd with the -u option and specifying the
group by using a string not a numeric gid the daemon uses
the gid of the user not the group. This problem is now fixed
by this update.
The libUil component of the OpenMotif toolkit has a pair of buffer
overflow vulnerabilities that can possibly be used for the execution
of arbitrary code.
A buffer overflow has been discovered in the PCRE, a widely used library
that provides Perl compatible regular expressions. Specially crafted
regular expressions triggered a buffer overflow. On systems that accept
arbitrary regular expressions from untrusted users, this could be exploited
to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the application using the
library.
There are two vulnerabilities with perl when it is used in a setuid mode. The PERLIO_DEBUG environment variable can be used to overwrite arbitrary files; there is also an associated buffer overflow which can be exploited to gain root access.
PHP has a response splitting vulnerability, remote attackers can inject
arbitrary HTTP headers via an unknown method, possibly using a
Set-Cookie header.
Also, a number of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities can be used by
remote attackers to inject arbitrary web scripts or html pages.
The phpbb2 web forum has a number of vulnerabilities including:
a web script injection problem, a protection mechanism bypass, a
security check bypass, a remote global variable bypass, cross site
scripting vulnerabilities, an SQL injection vulnerability,
a remote regular expression modification problem, missing input
sanitizing, and a missing request validation problem.
Stefan Esser reported multiple vulnerabilities
found in phpMyAdmin. The $GLOBALS variable allows modifying the global
variable import_blacklist to open phpMyAdmin to local and remote file
inclusion, depending on your PHP version (CVE-2005-4079, PMASA-2005-9).
Furthermore, it is also possible to conduct an XSS attack via the
$HTTP_HOST variable and a local and remote file inclusion because the
contents of the variable are under total control of the attacker
(CVE-2005-3665, PMASA-2005-8).
PostgreSQL 7.3.x before 7.3.14, 7.4.x before 7.4.12, 8.0.x before 8.0.7,
and 8.1.x before 8.1.3, when compiled with Asserts enabled, allows local
users to cause a denial of service (server crash) via a crafted SET SESSION
AUTHORIZATION command, a different vulnerability than CVE-2006-0553.
HTTP requests with conflicting Content-Length and Transfer-Encoding headers
could lead to HTTP Request Smuggling Attack, which can be exploited to
bypass packet filters or poison web caches.
Max Vozeler reported that pstotext calls the GhostScript interpreter on
untrusted PostScript files without specifying the -dSAFER option. An
attacker could craft a malicious PostScript file and entice a user to run
pstotext on it, resulting in the execution of arbitrary commands with the
permissions of the user running pstotext. See this Secunia advisory for more information.
Py2Play uses Python pickles to send objects over a peer-to-peer game network, that clients accept without restriction the objects and code sent by peers. A remote attacker participating in a Py2Play-powered game can send
malicious Python pickles, resulting in the execution of arbitrary
Python code on the targeted game client.
Luigi Auriemma discovered multiple flaws in the Scorched 3D game
server, including a format string vulnerability and several buffer
overflows. A remote attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to crash
a game server or execute arbitrary code with the rights of the game server
user.
Upstream developers of squid, the popular WWW proxy cache, have
discovered that changes in the authentication scheme are not handled
properly when given certain request sequences while NTLM
authentication is in place, which may cause the daemon to restart.
Webmail.php in SquirrelMail 1.4.0 to 1.4.5 allows remote attackers to
inject arbitrary web pages into the right frame via a URL in the
right_frame parameter. NOTE: this has been called a cross-site scripting
(XSS) issue, but it is different than what is normally identified as
XSS. (CVE-2006-0188)
Interpretation conflict in the MagicHTML filter in SquirrelMail 1.4.0 to
1.4.5 allows remote attackers to conduct cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks
via style sheet specifiers with invalid (1) "/*" and "*/" comments, or (2)
a newline in a "url" specifier, which is processed by certain web browsers
including Internet Explorer. (CVE-2006-0195)
CRLF injection vulnerability in SquirrelMail 1.4.0 to 1.4.5 allows remote
attackers to inject arbitrary IMAP commands via newline characters in the
mailbox parameter of the sqimap_mailbox_select command, aka "IMAP
injection." (CVE-2006-0377)
The Struts error display system has a cross-site scripting vulnerability.
An attacker may be able to maliciously craft a URL that can trick
a user into thinking they are looking at a trusted site when they are not.
The tar utility does not properly filter file names containing
"../", meaning that a hostile archive can, if unpacked by an
unsuspecting user, overwrite any file that is writable by that user. GNU
tar versions 1.13.19 and earlier are vulnerable; unzip through version 5.42
has the same vulnerability.
The rsvp_print function in tcpdump 3.9.1 and earlier allows remote
attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop) via a crafted RSVP
packet of length 4. (CAN-2005-1280)
tcpdump 3.8.3 and earlier allows remote attackers to cause a denial of
service (infinite loop) via a crafted BGP packet, which is not properly
handled by RT_ROUTING_INFO, or LDP packet, which is not properly
handled by the ldp_print function. (CAN-2005-1279)
The isis_print function, as called by isoclns_print, in tcpdump 3.9.1 and
earlier allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite
loop) via a zero length, as demonstrated using a GRE packet.
(CAN-2005-1278)
The teTeX PDF parsing library has an integer overflow vulnerability.
A carefully crafted PDF file can be used by an attacker to crash
teTeX and possibly execute arbitrary code.
A buffer overflow in UnZip 5.50 and earlier allows local users to execute
arbitrary code via a long filename command line argument. NOTE: since the
overflow occurs in a non-setuid program, there are not many scenarios under
which it poses a vulnerability, unless unzip is passed long arguments when
it is invoked from other programs.
crontab in Vixie cron 4.1, when running with the -e option, allows local
users to read the cron files of other users by changing the file being
edited to a symlink. NOTE: there is insufficient information to know
whether this is a duplicate of CVE-2001-0235. See also this Security Focus
report.
xtensive testing of libwww's handling of multipart/byteranges content from
HTTP/1.1 servers revealed multiple logical flaws and bugs in
Library/src/HTBound.c
Shaun Colley discovered a problem in xine-ui, the xine video player
user interface. A script contained in the package to possibly remedy
a problem or report a bug does not create temporary files in a secure
fashion. This could allow a local attacker to overwrite files with
the privileges of the user invoking xine.
Three buffer overflows were discovered in xloadimage when handling the image title name. A malicious user can construct a NIFF file that when viewed and processed (with either zoom, reduce or rotate) by xloadimage, will cause the program to overwrite the return address and execute arbitrary code.
The pixmap memory allocation code in the X.Org X window system is
vulnerable to an integer overflow, a local user can use this to
execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges.
Derek Noonburg has fixed several potential vulnerabilities in xpdf,
which are also present in gpdf, the Portable Document Format (PDF)
viewer with Gtk bindings.
Xpdf, the associated poppler library, and other applications using that library are susceptible to a new set of buffer overflows discovered by Chris Evans and infamous41md. These overflows could be exploited, via a malicious PDF file, to execute arbitrary code on the target system.
A flaw was discovered in Xpdf in that could allow an attacker to construct
a carefully crafted PDF file that would cause Xpdf to consume all available
disk space in /tmp when opened.
xpdf has a number of integer overflows.
A remote attacker can trick a user into opening a maliciously
crafted pdf file, allowing the attacker to execute code with the
privileges of the local user.
This also affects the Poppler library, cupsys and tetex-bin.
