Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 177311
CVE-2005-4618 sysctl overflow
Last modified: 2012-06-20 09:33:10 EDT
CVE defines CVE-2005-4618 as: "Buffer overflow in sysctl in the Linux Kernel 2.6 before 2.6.15 allows local users to cause a denial of service and possibly execute arbitrary code via a long string, which causes sysctl to write a zero byte outside the buffer." This is fixed by http://linux.bkbits.net:8080/linux-2.6/cset@43b729ad5Zc6t6URyaHNNtodT1nRpg I can't see a useful attack vector here, writing a character to one spot after a userland buffer seems to me likely at the worst to crash your userland program, and not cause a DoS or privilege escalation. So we have marked this severity low but this could equally be severity none (kernel maintainers please let us know what you think after analysis)
agreed. the bug here is that a NULL character can be written 1 byte off the end of a user supplied buffer, which is a potential data corruption. I don't see any DoS issue here, if the extra byte is not mapped, then the kernel will return cleanly. A single byte corruption of userspace is fairly serious though, imo.
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