Serious Network Function Vulnerability Found In Glibc

An anonymous reader writes: A very serious security problem has been found and patched in the GNU C Library (Glibc). A heap-based buffer overflow was found in __nss_hostname_digits_dots() function, which is used by the gethostbyname() and gethostbyname2() function calls. A remote attacker able to make an application call to either of these functions could use this flaw to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running the program. The vulnerability is easy to trigger as gethostbyname() can be called remotely for applications that do any kind of DNS resolving within the code. Qualys, who discovered the vulnerability (nicknamed "Ghost") during a code audit, wrote a mailing list entry with more details, including in-depth analysis and exploit vectors.

Comments

From TFA

[Cola Junkee]

" - We identified a number of factors that mitigate the impact of this bug. In particular, we discovered that it was fixed on May 21, 2013 (between the releases of glibc-2.17 and glibc-2.18). Unfortunately, it was not recognized as a security threat; as a result, most stable and long-term-support distributions were left exposed (and still are): Debian 7 (wheezy), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 & 7, CentOS 6 & 7, Ubuntu 12.04, for example. "

So it's actually already been fixed. All that's needed here is for some distributions to push the fix out.

Raspbian vulnerable

[redelm]

According to directions side-thread, glibc versions prior to 2.19 are vulnerable. Checking my machines, Slackware-current and Lubuntu-14.10 are fine. Only my poor tiny Raspberry Pis are vulnerable (2.13). But they run slowly enough I can watch the gethostbyname() lookups myself :)