+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #163958 +++ From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050720 Firefox/1.0.6 Description of problem: This bug has been fixed in Debian and in newest Perl. I'm just wondering does this concern RHEL 3 too, because we are rather close having "too much" users in one group and I would rather see this bug fixed before that we are going to have problems. * Fix test of reenterant function return values which was causing perl to malloc itself to death if ERANGE was encountered before ENOENT (such as a long line in /etc/group; closes: #227621). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Didn't try Additional info: -- Additional comment from jvdias on 2005-11-02 16:23 EST -- This is PERL bug 37056, fixed with patch 25084 in bleadperl (5.9.x): ( http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=37056 ) Subject: getgrent fails if a line in /etc/groups gets too long Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 15:53:08 +0200 To: perlbug From: Michiel Blotwijk <michiel> This is a bug report for perl from michiel, generated with the help of perlbug 1.35 running under perl v5.8.5. ----------------------------------------------------------------- [Please enter your report here] The function getgrent throws an error if a line in /etc/groups gets too long (> 3000 characters). This error can be reproduced as follows: 1/ Manually add a large number of users to a group in /etc/group. It doesn't really matter if these are real users or not, as long as the line exceeds 3000 characters. 2/ perl -e 'use User::grent; while (my $gr = getgrent() ) { print $gr->name."\n"; }' This will return an "Out of memory!" message. This thread seems to be related: http://lists.debian.org/debian-security/2005/06/msg00041.html Originally reported at Debian: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=227621 As said in the Debian bug report: From: "Steinar H. Gunderson" <sgunderson> To: Peter Palúch <peterp.utc.sk> Cc: control.org, 227621.org, debian-security.org Subject: Re: perl: getgrnam() crashes with "Out of memory" if /etc/group contains long lines Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 15:03:02 +0200 It's about the same bug in perl as it was in glibc. reentr.pl line 698 reads: $call = qq[((PL_REENTRANT_RETINT = $call)$test ? $true : (((PL_REENTRANT_RETINT == ERANGE) || (errno == ERANGE)) ? ($seenm{$func}{$seenr{$func}})Perl_reentrant_retry("$func"$rv) : 0))]; The problem here is "errno == ERANGE". If, at any time, there's a line longer than the initial buffer, getgrent() (or any in the same family) will get ERANGE back (and errno will be set to ERANGE). However, this is never reset. Thus, when getgrent_r() hits EOF, it returns ENOENT, _but errno is still ERANGE_. Perl figures the buffer was too small, doubles it and tries again, but still gets ENOENT, of course (and errno is still ERANGE). This goes on forever and ever until you run out of memory (which happens quite fast). The solution is simply to remove "errno == ERANGE" AFAICS; getgrent_r() does not define what happens to errno, and the return message will always be ERANGE if the buffer is too small. I'm a bit tempted to tag this "security"; if a user can (say) change his or her own GECOS field to make it long enough, Perl programs using getpwent() will crash, for instance. I can't find any direct way to exploit it (chfn limits the length of the fields, for instance), but I'm still slightly concerned over the possibilities of a DoS; Cc-ing debian-security. /* Steinar */ I agree this bug has security implications . This problem affects all {get,set}* nss perl wrapper functions, not only getgrent . This problem affects all previous releases of PERL in all current Red Hat releases. The patch is very straightforward - replace all occurences of ((PL_REENTRANT_RETINT == ERANGE) || (errno == ERANGE)) with (PL_REENTRANT_RETINT == ERANGE) in reentr.inc and reentr.pl. This bug is now being fixed in these perl versions: Rawhide / FC-5 : perl-5.8.7-0.7.fc5 FC-4 : perl-5.8.6-16 RHEL-4 : perl-5.8.5-17.RHEL4 RHEL-3 : perl-5.8.0-90.2
This problem is fixed in perl-5.8.5-17.RHEL4+ .
From User-Agent: XML-RPC perl-5.8.5-18.FC3 has been pushed for FC3, which should resolve this issue. If these problems are still present in this version, then please make note of it in this bug report.
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on the solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2005-880.html