An integer overflow, leading to buffer overflow flaw was found in the way the implementation of strcoll() routine, used to compare two strings based on the current locale, of glibc, the GNU libc libraries, performed calculation of memory requirements / allocation, needed for storage of the strings. If an application linked against glibc was missing an application-level sanity checks for validity of strcoll() arguments and accepted untrusted input, an attacker could use this flaw to cause the particular application to crash or, potentially, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the application.
Upstream bug report (including reproducer):
[1] http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14547
This issue affects the versions of the glibc package, as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6.
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This issue affects the versions of the glibc package, as shipped with Fedora release of 16 and 17. Please schedule an update (once there is final upstream patch available).