Bug 201919 (CVE-2006-1168)

Summary: CVE-2006-1168 ncompress: .bss buffer underflow in decompression
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: Marcel Holtmann <holtmann>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status: CLOSED ERRATA QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: dvlasenk, security-response-team
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: 2012-06-20 10:06:25 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: 201335, 728536, 768083, 772473, 790335, 800293, 802089    
Bug Blocks: 742493, 784298    

Description Marcel Holtmann 2006-08-09 19:21:31 UTC
Report from Tavis Ormandy, Google Security Team:

An audit of ncompress version 4.2.4 uncovered a serious security flaw, this loop
in decompress() (~1749, compress42.c) performs no bounds checking, allowing a
specially crafted datastream to underflow a .bss buffer with attacker controlled
data. Some research reveals that the lzw decompressors from gzip and openbsd
(both derived from the same public domain implementation) have already corrected
this flaw, however ncompress shipped by (at least) gentoo, debian, fedora and
suse seem to still be vulnerable.

              while ((cmp_code_int)code >= (cmp_code_int)256)
              { /* Generate output characters in reverse order */
                  *--stackp = tab_suffixof(code);
                  code = tab_prefixof(code);
              }

In my test environment I've been able to successfully overwirte .got and .dtors
with controlled data. The most simple testcase would be:

$ perl -e 'print "\x1f\x9d\x90","\x01"x"2048"' | compress -d

My suggested fix would be adding  `&& stackp >= htabof(0)` to the loop condition.

Comment 1 Peter Vrabec 2006-08-11 11:46:22 UTC
fixed in ncompress-4.2.4-45

Comment 3 Tomas Hoger 2011-08-17 15:45:49 UTC
This was fixed in ncompress versions shipped in Red Hat Enterprise Linux:

https://www.redhat.com/security/data/cve/CVE-2006-1168.html

and Fedora.  The fix has not bee applied to busybox yet, which include a copy of the ncompress code.

Comment 4 Tomas Hoger 2011-08-18 12:45:29 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> The fix has not bee applied to busybox yet, which include a copy of the
> ncompress code.

Fixed now via:
http://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/archival/libarchive/decompress_uncompress.c?id=251fc70e9722f931eec23a34030d05ba5f747b0e

Comment 7 Murray McAllister 2012-02-03 05:49:39 UTC
Acknowledgements:

Red Hat would like to thank Tavis Ormandy of the Google Security Team for reporting this issue.

Comment 9 errata-xmlrpc 2012-02-21 03:20:48 UTC
This issue has been addressed in following products:

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Via RHSA-2012:0308 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-0308.html

Comment 12 errata-xmlrpc 2012-06-20 07:16:07 UTC
This issue has been addressed in following products:

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Via RHSA-2012:0810 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-0810.html