glibc $ORIGIN problem - CVE-2010-3847

[Marcus Meissner <meissner () suse de>]

Hi,

The actually exploitable impact of Tavis glibc $ORIGIN problem is still a bit open question.

Apparently the bad code has a assert() in front which causes this assertion failure:

$ LD_AUDIT=\$ORIGIN ping
Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-open.c: 231: dl_open_worker: Assertion `(call_map)->l_name[0] == '\0'' failed!
$ 

If glibc was built with -DNDEBUG the assert() is empty and the code will proceed
into the exploitable parts.

Sebastian Krahmer of my team looked at this yesterday and was quite confident
that the problematic zone is protected by this assert(). The source code is however
quite a labyrinth of c files, headers and macros so we might have missed something.

Andreas Schwab of Redhat has posted candidate patches to fix the problems:
        http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-hacker/2010-10/msg00007.html
        http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-hacker/2010-10/msg00008.html

Ciao, Marcus