Bug 144362

Summary:	CAN-2004-1074 a.out binfmt DoS
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1	Reporter:	Josh Bressers <bressers>
Component:	kernel	Assignee:	Jim Paradis <jparadis>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Brian Brock <bbrock>
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	2.1	CC:	peterm, riel
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Security
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:	public=20041111,impact=important
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2005-01-17 21:31:10 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:

Description Josh Bressers 2005-01-06 15:24:08 UTC

*** This bug has been split off bug 144361 ***

------- Original comment by Josh Bressers (Security Response Team) on 2005.01.06
10:21 -------

From the lkml mailing list.
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0411.1/1222.html

It is possible that an improperly formed a.out binary can cause a
kernel-oops, which if executed in a loop will ead fd's and memory.
It seems that you have to turn on memory overcommit on for this to
work.

davej says we didn't enable a.out binaries on FC3 and RHEL4.  This
will be undone in the future though.

We do not turn on memory overcommit by default in RHEL2.1 or 3.
This should make the impact of this issue significantly mitigated
since it seems the issue is only exploitable when overcommit
is on (sysctl -w vm.overcommit_memory=1).  However note that
we do tell customers how to turn this on.

fixed=2.6.10 (20041116 cset@419aaba8xdR0decwoMnVpt3G8_f8kQ)
not fixed for 2.4 (as at Nov24)

Patch: http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0411.1/1290.html

Comment 1 Jim Paradis 2005-01-17 21:31:10 UTC

This is NOTABUG for AS2.1-i386 since it is based on 2.4.9 which handles vma's
differently.  The poisoned binary exits with an error rather than crashing, so
there's no DoS.