Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: gm4 format strings on OSX
From: Peter Pentchev <roam () ringlet net>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 04:32:23 +0300
On Sat, Oct 20, 2001 at 12:22:31PM -0700, dotslash () snosoft com wrote:
This in itself is not an issue due to the lack of a suid bit... however if I remember correctly there were a few linux suid root binaries that were reliant upon m4 in some way or another thus making them vulnerable to a local root expoit. This is on osx 10.1. [OSXBOX:~] elguapo% ls -al `which m4` -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 26696 Sep 2 20:59 /usr/bin/m4 [OSXBOX:~] elguapo% ls -al `which gm4` -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 97464 Sep 2 20:53 /usr/bin/gm4 [OSXBOX:~] elguapo% m4 %p m4: %p: No such file or directory [OSXBOX:~] elguapo% gm4 %p gm4: 0x4f4d453d: No such file or directory [OSXBOX:~] elguapo% gm4 %s gm4: Memory bounds violation detected (SIGSEGV). Either a stack overflow occurred, or there is a bug in gm4. Check for possible infinite recursion. Segmentation fault
[CC'd to bug-gnu-utils, hopefully this is the right address; if it is not (GNU seems to have moved away from prep.ai), then please somebody notify the current m4 maintainers] Confirmed with GNU m4 1.4 on FreeBSD 4.4-STABLE as of Oct 21. The attached patch fixes the reported segfault and one other unsafe use of the m4 internal function error(). I have not looked at other functions within m4 that might use printf(3) and friends unsafely, so there might be other bugs lurking about. G'luck, Peter -- If this sentence were in Chinese, it would say something else.
Attachment:
m4.c.patch
Description:
Current thread:
- gm4 format strings on OSX dotslash (Oct 21)
- Re: gm4 format strings on OSX Peter Pentchev (Oct 22)
- Re: gm4 format strings on OSX Peter Pentchev (Oct 22)
- Re: gm4 format strings on OSX Peter Pentchev (Oct 22)