Synopsis

Important: glibc security update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory: Important

Topic

An update for glibc is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) in the References section.

Description

The glibc packages provide the standard C libraries (libc), POSIX thread libraries (libpthread), standard math libraries (libm), and the name service cache daemon (nscd) used by multiple programs on the system. Without these libraries, the Linux system cannot function correctly.

Security Fix(es):

• A flaw was found in the way memory was being allocated on the stack for user space binaries. If heap (or different memory region) and stack memory regions were adjacent to each other, an attacker could use this flaw to jump over the stack guard gap, cause controlled memory corruption on process stack or the adjacent memory region, and thus increase their privileges on the system. This is glibc-side mitigation which blocks processing of LD_LIBRARY_PATH for programs running in secure-execution mode and reduces the number of allocations performed by the processing of LD_AUDIT, LD_PRELOAD, and LD_HWCAP_MASK, making successful exploitation of this issue more difficult. (CVE-2017-1000366)

Red Hat would like to thank Qualys Research Labs for reporting this issue.

Solution

For details on how to apply this update, which includes the changes described in this advisory, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

For the update to take effect, all services linked to the glibc library must be restarted, or the system rebooted.

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 6 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 6 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems) 6 s390x

Fixes

• BZ - 1452543 - CVE-2017-1000366 glibc: heap/stack gap jumping via unbounded stack allocations

CVEs

• CVE-2017-1000366

References