Bug 1223813 (CVE-2015-4041)

Summary:	CVE-2015-4041 coreutils: heap buffer overflow in sort(1) keycompare_mb()
Product:	[Other] Security Response	Reporter:	Vasyl Kaigorodov <vkaigoro>
Component:	vulnerability	Assignee:	Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	unspecified	CC:	admiller, jrusnack, kdudka, kzak, ooprala, ovasik, pbrady, p, slukasik, twaugh, vkaigoro
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Security
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2015-06-30 13:48:56 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:	1223821
Bug Blocks:	1223819

Description Vasyl Kaigorodov 2015-05-21 13:25:45 UTC

It was reported that a heap overflow can be triggered in sort(1).
This appears to be caused by performing a size calculation without properly considering the number of bytes occupied by multibyte characters.

Initial report: https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=928749
Fix: https://github.com/pixelb/coreutils/commit/bea5e36cc876ed627bb5e0eca36fdfaa6465e940
CVE assignment: http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2015/q2/502

Comment 1 Vasyl Kaigorodov 2015-05-21 13:35:25 UTC

Created coreutils tracking bugs for this issue:

Affects: fedora-all [bug 1223821]

Comment 2 Ondrej Vasik 2015-05-22 08:02:59 UTC

I believe heap buffer overflow affects only older versions of sort i18n patch (IOW only one of CVEs is valid for current Fedora patch, another one is valid only for RHEL 6 and older). LC_ALL=C sort code path is completely unaffected. Do you plan to create RHEL 6/7 bz for this CVE? Actually I think this (and previous similar flaws in i18n patch that got CVE as well) was the primary reason why P.Brady contacted secalert about this issue.

Comment 7 Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2020-02-11 03:34:49 UTC

Mitigation:

This flaw is triggered by using sort on specially crafted malicious data file. When using sort with trusted inputs, this flaw cannot be triggered.