From: "Will Drewry" <drewry> Subject: Multiple vulnerabilities in GDB To: dan, jimb, ezannoni Cc: cve, vendor-sec Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 18:59:33 +0100 Reply-To: wad Hi GDB maintainers (et. al.) - I'm mailing to inform you that I've run across some exploitable vulnerabilities in GDB. I've included a simple patch along with a proof of concept in the advisory below. The GNU Debugger (GDB) Multiple Vulnerabilities ----------------------------------------------- Summary ------- Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in the GNU debugger that allow for the execution of arbitrary code. Background ---------- GDB is the GNU Project Debugger. It is described on its project page [http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/] as allowing "you to see what is going on `inside' another program while it executes -- or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed." DWARF is a information format standard used to represent debugging information for a specific binary. While the first version was originally used in ELF, ELF later moved to STABS. In more recent years, DWARF version 2.0 has been reintroduced into ELF binaries. More information can be found at http://dwarf.freestandards.org. Impact ------ A successful exploit would result in the execution of arbitrary code on the loading of a specially crafted executable. This a viable mechanism for an attacker to escape restricted environments by piggybacking exploit code on seeming harmless files often used for debugging. In the worst case, this could allow for privilege escalation. Workaround ---------- Do not use GDB on untrusted files that may have DWARF(2) debugging information, e.g. binaries and core files. There is no way to verify if an untrusted file is safe to debug without investigating the debugging symbols manually. Discussion ---------- Will Drewry <wad> of the Google Security Team has found multiple exploitable vulnerabilities in the DWARF and DWARF2 code. Initially, Tavis Ormandy <taviso>, also of the Google Security Team, discovered a crash condition in GDB related to DWARF2 debugging information. This discovery led to the further exploration of the condition, and the discovery of the security implications. The DWARF specification allows location description blocks containing a list of operations to be used to determine the final real address for some debugging symbol. GDB evaluates these operations on an unchecked stack buffer of size 64. This allows for any location block (DW_FORM_block) with more than 64 operations to overwrite the current stack frame with arbitrary user-supplied data. This behavior occurs in both dwarfread.c and dwarfread2.c.
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-2007-0469.html