USN-3534-1: GNU C Library vulnerabilities

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-3534-1

17th January, 2018

eglibc, glibc vulnerabilities

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its
derivatives:

Ubuntu 17.10
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Summary

Several security issues were fixed in the GNU C library.

Software description

eglibc
– GNU C Library
glibc
– GNU C Library

Details

It was discovered that the GNU C library did not properly handle all of
the possible return values from the kernel getcwd(2) syscall. A local
attacker could potentially exploit this to execute arbitrary code in setuid
programs and gain administrative privileges. (CVE-2018-1000001)

A memory leak was discovered in the _dl_init_paths() function in the GNU
C library dynamic loader. A local attacker could potentially exploit this
with a specially crafted value in the LD_HWCAP_MASK environment variable,
in combination with CVE-2017-1000409 and another vulnerability on a system
with hardlink protections disabled, in order to gain administrative
privileges. (CVE-2017-1000408)

A heap-based buffer overflow was discovered in the _dl_init_paths()
function in the GNU C library dynamic loader. A local attacker could
potentially exploit this with a specially crafted value in the
LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, in combination with CVE-2017-1000408
and another vulnerability on a system with hardlink protections disabled,
in order to gain administrative privileges. (CVE-2017-1000409)

An off-by-one error leading to a heap-based buffer overflow was discovered
in the GNU C library glob() implementation. An attacker could potentially
exploit this to cause a denial of service or execute arbitrary code via a
maliciously crafted pattern. (CVE-2017-15670)

A heap-based buffer overflow was discovered during unescaping of user names
with the ~ operator in the GNU C library glob() implementation. An attacker
could potentially exploit this to cause a denial of service or execute
arbitrary code via a maliciously crafted pattern. (CVE-2017-15804)

It was discovered that the GNU C library dynamic loader mishandles RPATH
and RUNPATH containing $ORIGIN for privileged (setuid or AT_SECURE)
programs. A local attacker could potentially exploit this by providing a
specially crafted library in the current working directory in order to
gain administrative privileges. (CVE-2017-16997)

It was discovered that the GNU C library malloc() implementation could
return a memory block that is too small if an attempt is made to allocate
an object whose size is close to SIZE_MAX, resulting in a heap-based
overflow. An attacker could potentially exploit this to cause a denial of
service or execute arbitrary code. This issue only affected Ubuntu 17.10.
(CVE-2017-17426)