Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: xterm segfaults from environment variables - too obvious
From: abelits () PHOBOS ILLTEL DENVER CO US (Alex Belits)
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 14:03:51 -0800
On Wed, 12 Mar 1997, David Luyer wrote:
This system is not vulnerable to the overflow previously mentioned on bugtraq for X11R6.1. It's stock debian 1.2.8 (progressively upgraded since 1.1.something, but that should be irrelevant). The main point of my previous email was to show how easy it is to find this kind of bug - I took a system which had all the latest security fixes as at yesterday, added 5 minutes of my time and had a buffer overflow. With very little work the scripts could be made to probe all suid binaries on a standard install (they need to be run as root of course to set preload for suid executables) for buffer overflows after getenv() calls.
After some looking at the code I think, I've found the real cause of coredumps. getenv in getenv2.so returns always the same static buffer while real getenv returns pointers to actual environment. xterm crashes with getenv2.so compiled from given source but doesn't crash if static keyword is removed thus causing "environment values" to be malloc'ed every time. -- Alex
Current thread:
- Re: xterm segfaults from environment variables - too obvious Alex Belits (Mar 11)
- Re: xterm segfaults from environment variables - too obvious David Luyer (Mar 11)