Synopsis

Low: boost security and bug fix update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Low

Topic

Updated boost packages that fix two security issues and two bugs are now
available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having low
security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores,
which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability
from the CVE links in the References section.

Description

The boost packages provide free, peer-reviewed, portable C++ source
libraries with emphasis on libraries which work well with the C++ Standard
Library.

Invalid pointer dereference flaws were found in the way the Boost regular
expression library processed certain, invalid expressions. An attacker able
to make an application using the Boost library process a specially-crafted
regular expression could cause that application to crash or, potentially,
execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the
application. (CVE-2008-0171)

NULL pointer dereference flaws were found in the way the Boost regular
expression library processed certain, invalid expressions. An attacker able
to make an application using the Boost library process a specially-crafted
regular expression could cause that application to crash. (CVE-2008-0172)

Red Hat would like to thank Will Drewry for reporting these issues.

This update also fixes the following bugs:

• Prior to this update, the construction of a regular expression object

could fail when several regular expression objects were created
simultaneously, such as in a multi-threaded program. With this update, the
object variables have been moved from the shared memory to the stack. Now,
the constructing function is thread safe. (BZ#472384)

• Prior to this update, header files in several Boost libraries contained

preprocessor directives that the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 4.4 could
not handle. This update instead uses equivalent constructs that are
standard C. (BZ#567722)

All users of boost are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
fix these issues.

Solution

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

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to
use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 5 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 5 ppc
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 428316 - CVE-2008-0171 boost regular expression memory corruption flaws
• BZ - 428320 - CVE-2008-0172 boost regular expression NULL dereference flaw
• BZ - 472384 - Thread-safety bug in Boost.Regex-1.33.x
• BZ - 567722 - g++4.4 incompatible with numeric/ublas/matrix_sparse.hpp

CVEs

• CVE-2008-0171
• CVE-2008-0172

References