A flaw was found in the way ppm2tiff, a tool to create a TIFF file from PPM, PGM and PBM image files, did not check the return value of TIFFScanlineSize() function. When TIFFScanlineSize encountered an integer-overflow and returned zero, this value was not checked. A remote attacker could provide a specially-crafted PPM image format file, that when processed by ppm2tiff would lead to ppm2tiff executable crash or, potentially, arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the user running the ppm2tiff binary.
Analysis (I am using libtiff-4.0.3 as the base for the line numbers): ==================================================================== In ppm2tiff.c:241 the following code is used: buf = (unsigned char *)_TIFFmalloc(TIFFScanlineSize(out)); However TIFFScanlineSize() detects an integer overflow using the following code segment: if ((uint64)n!=m) { TIFFErrorExt(tif->tif_clientdata,module,"Integer arithmetic overflow"); n=0; } return(n); } Due to overflow the return value from TIFFScanlineSize is zero. However ppm2tiff.c does not check this return value and uses zero to malloc memory via _TIFFmalloc. _TIFFmalloc is just a wrapper around glibc malloc. As per glibc: Even a request for zero bytes (i.e., malloc(0)) returns a pointer to something of the minimum allocatable size. So this causes some memory to be allocated to buf. Later data is written into buf via: if (TIFFWriteScanline(out, buf, row, 0) < 0) This causes a heap-based buffer overflow.
Created attachment 635949 [details] proposed patch
Public via the following Changelog committed upstream: 2012-11-01 Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam> * tools/ppm2tiff.c: avoid zero size buffer vulnerability. CVE-2012-4564 - Thanks to Huzaifa Sidhpurwala of the Red Hat Security Response team for the fix.
This issue affects the version of libtiff as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6. This issue affects the version of libtiff as shipped with Fedora 16 and Fedora 17.
Acknowledgements: This issue was discovered by Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala of Red Hat Security Response Team.
Created libtiff tracking bugs for this issue Affects: fedora-all [bug 880907]
This issue has been addressed in following products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Via RHSA-2012:1590 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1590.html
libtiff-3.9.7-1.fc16 has been pushed to the Fedora 16 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
libtiff-3.9.7-1.fc17 has been pushed to the Fedora 17 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
libtiff-4.0.3-2.fc18 has been pushed to the Fedora 18 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.