RHSA-2003:334 - Security Advisory

Topic

Updated glibc packages that resolve a vulnerability and address several bugs
are now available.

Description

The glibc packages contain GNU libc, which provides standard system libraries.

Herbert Xu reported that various applications can accept spoofed messages
sent on the kernel netlink interface by other users on the local machine.
This could lead to a local denial of service attack. The glibc function
getifaddrs uses netlink and could therefore be vulnerable to this issue.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has
assigned the name CAN-2003-0859 to this issue.

In addition to the security issues, a number of other bugs were fixed.

Users are advised to upgrade to these erratum packages, which contain a
patch that checks that netlink messages actually came from the kernel
and patches for the various bug fixes.

Solution

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

To update all RPMs for your particular architecture, run:

rpm -Fvh [filenames]

where [filenames] is a list of the RPMs you wish to upgrade. Only those
RPMs which are currently installed will be updated. Those RPMs which are
not installed but included in the list will not be updated. Note that you
can also use wildcards (*.rpm) if your current directory *only* contains the
desired RPMs.

Please note that this update is also available via Red Hat Network. Many
people find this an easier way to apply updates. 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.

If up2date fails to connect to Red Hat Network due to SSL
Certificate Errors, you need to install a version of the
up2date client with an updated certificate. The latest version of
up2date is available from the Red Hat FTP site and may also be
downloaded directly from the RHN website:

https://rhn.redhat.com/help/latest-up2date.pxt

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 3 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 3 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 3 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 3 s390
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 3 ppc

Fixes

• BZ - 90402 - backtrace() is broken
• BZ - 101261 - getnameinfo fails to to reverse lookup on IPv6 addresses
• BZ - 103727 - LD_PROFILE=libc.so.6 and sprof give seg fault
• BZ - 107846 - locale utility is broken on big-endian 64-bit platforms
• BZ - 108631 - LTC5138-NPTL: pthread_condtimedwait hang or mutex_lock hang
• BZ - 108634 - Signal handler installation races with signal, glibc-2.3.2

CVEs

• CVE-2003-0859

References

(none)