oss-sec mailing list archives
Re: CVE Request -- gpsd 3.9 fixing a denial of service flaw
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr () thyrsus com>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2013 15:41:51 -0400
Kurt Seifried <kseifried () redhat com>:
On 05/02/2013 03:58 AM, Jan Lieskovsky wrote:@Eric - Eric, could you please help us to solve this doubt? (which of the patches is the correct one to fix the above mentioned DoS / security issue)
There are two critical patches which solve two different DoSes (well, one certain and one potential). Yes, it's a strange coincidence that both bugs were characterized at almost the same time after we haven't had a crash bug since 2007. The crash bug was in the NMEA driver. There's particular kind of malformed packet, sometimes emitted by SiRFStar-III receivers, that looks like this: $GPGGA,030130$GPGLL,2638.1728,N,08011.3893,W,030131.000,A,A*41\r\n See the incomplete GGA without trailing \r\n at the front? Usually that was harmless and would be silently discarded. Under rare circumstances it could core dump (but not any more, I now have a regression test to check this case). That fix was commit dd9c3c2830cb8f8fd8491ce68c82698dc5538f50. The potential crash/DoS was in the AIS driver. The first stage of what it does is un-armor an AIVDM ASCII packet representation into an equivalent binary packet which is then examined for data at specific bit offsets. The un-armoring logic was not properly bounds-checked, potentially opening up a hole. In theory, an overlong armored packet could be crafted to overrun the binary-packet buffer. I'm not sure that one was exploitable; there are other properties of the code (notably the bounds-checked maximum length of the AIVDM ASCII packet buffer) that seem to guarantee the end of the binary packet buffer could never be reached. I put in a check anyway, because (a) I could be wrong about that, (b) supposing I'm right, that invariant could get silently broken by a future code change. That was commit 08edc49d8f63c75bfdfb480b083b0d960310f94f, responding to Savannah bug #38511. Note: neither of these have privilege-escalation possibilities. gpsd needs root to initialize, but drops it long before either of these code defects could fire. If you have any other questions, do not hesitate to ask. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
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Current thread:
- CVE Request -- gpsd 3.9 fixing a denial of service flaw Jan Lieskovsky (May 02)
- Re: CVE Request -- gpsd 3.9 fixing a denial of service flaw Kurt Seifried (May 02)
- Re: CVE Request -- gpsd 3.9 fixing a denial of service flaw Eric S. Raymond (May 02)
- Re: CVE Request -- gpsd 3.9 fixing a denial of service flaw Jan Lieskovsky (May 03)
- Re: CVE Request -- gpsd 3.9 fixing a denial of service flaw Jan Lieskovsky (May 07)
- Re: CVE Request -- gpsd 3.9 fixing a denial of service flaw Eric S. Raymond (May 07)
- Re: CVE Request -- gpsd 3.9 fixing a denial of service flaw Eric S. Raymond (May 02)
- Re: CVE Request -- gpsd 3.9 fixing a denial of service flaw Kurt Seifried (May 02)