RHSA-2003:090 - Security Advisory

Topic

Updated glibc packages are available to fix an integer overflow in the XDR
decoder.

Description

The glibc package contains standard libraries which are used by
multiple programs on the system. Sun RPC is a remote procedure call
framework which allows clients to invoke procedures in a server process
over a network. XDR is a mechanism for encoding data structures for use
with RPC. NFS, NIS, and many other network services are built upon Sun
RPC. The XDR encoder/decoder provided with glibc, derived from Sun's RPC
implementation, was demonstrated to be vulnerable to an integer overflow.

An integer overflow is present in the xdrmem_getbytes() function of glibc
2.3.1 and earlier. Depending upon the application, this vulnerability
could cause buffer overflows and may be exploitable, leading to arbitrary
code execution.

All users should upgrade to these errata packages which contain patches to
the glibc libraries and, therefore, are not vulnerable to these issues.

Red Hat would like to thank eEye Digital Security for alerting us to this
issue.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

Please note that this update is available via Red Hat Network. To use Red
Hat Network, launch the Red Hat Update Agent with the following command:

up2date

This will start an interactive process that will result in the appropriate
RPMs being upgraded on your system.

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 2 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 2 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 2 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 2 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 82640 - Gdb unable to debug threaded apps
• BZ - 83227 - An issue in glibc-2.2.4-3: gethostbyname fails on a multihomed Tiger 4
• BZ - 86061 - CAN-2003-0028 XDR overflow in glibc
• BZ - 86439 - memccpy() can read past end of source string

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)