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Multiple FLAC Vulnerabilities Affect Every OS

Posted by kdawson on from the don't-hit-play dept.

Enon writes "eEye Digital Security has discovered 14 vulnerabilities in the FLAC file format that affect a huge range of media players on every supported operating system (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Unix, BSD, Solaris, and even some hardware players are vulnerable). Heise points out a number of vulnerable apps that use the open source libavcodec audio codec library, which in turn relies on the flawed libFLAC library. These vulnerabilities could allow a person of ill will to trojanize FLAC files that could compromise your computer if they are played on a vulnerable media player. eEye worked with US-CERT to notify vulnerable vendors."

3 of 360 comments (clear)

  1. Re:guard pages, bit masks, and so on: better by r00t · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The big thing is reliability. You have less to screw up.

    But yes, it is faster.

    The guard pages are essentially free. They have a minor one-time start-up cost, like doing a memory allocation. As long as you keep reusing that buffer, you don't have any extra overhead.

    Bit masking is a very cheap math operation. It does not need to involve the branch predictor. There is no "else" code to bloat things up and even contain more bugs; the mask simply forces the data to be good. (well, "good" as in "good enough for security" -- it won't turn an attempted buffer overflow exploit into beautiful music!)

    BTW, some Linux kernels also provide a "seccomp" mechanism. It's a severe sandbox, limiting you to about 4 system calls. If you can make your code tolerate that, remembering to close any unneeded file descriptors before you switch it on, you'll be damn secure.

  2. Re:A lot of these are app flaws, not flac flaws .. by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Interesting

    it's a bunch of bugs in the libFLAC that is used in a heck of a lot of apps.

    Its an example of a particular implementation becoming the standard. They might as well not even have a file format specification.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  3. Re:Some things in life, money can't buy... by AikonMGB · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I am not myself an audiophile (though I do exhibit some audiophile tendencies); I thought the idea behind using gold-plated connectors was not that they sounded better, but because they stayed sounding the same for longer due to not corroding?

    Aikon-