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Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2010 15:43:44 -0500 (EST)
From: "Steven M. Christey" <coley@...-smtp.mitre.org>
To: Petr Matousek <pmatouse@...hat.com>
cc: "Steven M. Christey" <coley@...-smtp.mitre.org>,
        oss-security@...ts.openwall.com,
        Dan Rosenberg <dan.j.rosenberg@...il.com>
Subject: Re: CVE request: kernel: CAN information leak, 2nd
 attempt


Hmmm, a couple things going on here.  I'm fine with associating 
CVE-2010-3874 with the overflow.  But note - if the overflow does not 
affect any decision-making, bypass protection logic, or cause a DoS (e.g. 
if certain values of the overflowed field cause a CPU hit), then it's 
probably OK to treat it as non-security.  There hasn't been much security 
analysis done in semantic overflows and we probably have to treat them on 
a case-by-case basis.  For example - if the last field happens to be a 
bank account balance, or a flag stating whether a user has some kind of 
special privilege, then that's a security issue even without memory 
corruption (or rather, it's still "memory" corruption, just not with the 
same kinds of management structures that we usually run into currently).

Use CVE-2010-4565 for the kernel address leak.

- Steve



On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Petr Matousek wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> I'm ok with this, but I wanted to point out that the previously
>> mentioned heap overflow is a semantic overflow only. Because the
>> field that is being overflowed is the last field in a struct that is
>> always allocated in a chunk significantly larger than the struct
>> itself, the overflow will never result in any kind of corruption, so
>> it has essentially no security impact.
>
> Yes, we are aware of this [1]. Personally I'd call it a mitigation factor
> even though I don't have a strong opinion here. Steve, could you please
> comment?
>
>  [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=649695#c7
>
> Petr
>
>>
>> -Dan
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 1:36 PM, Petr Matousek <pmatouse@...hat.com>
>> wrote:
>>> "The CAN protocol uses the address of a kernel heap object as a proc
>>> filename, revealing information that could be useful during
>>> exploitation."
>>>
>>> Reference:
>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=664544
>>> http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2010/q4/103
>>>
>>> Credit: Dan Rosenberg
>>>
>>> ------------
>>>
>>> Please note that there has been one attempt to request CVE for this
>>> issue already [1]. The problem is that vendors (Red Hat more or less
>>> included) used the assigned CVE for the potential heap overflow
>>> issue
>>> [2, 3] whereas reporter used it for information leak [4].
>>>
>>>  [1] http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2010/q4/107
>>>  [2]
>>>  http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-updates/2010-12/msg00026.html
>>>  [3] http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2126
>>>  [4] http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/drosenbe/research.html
>>>
>>> I'd suggest to keep the CVE-2010-3874 id for the heap overflow which
>>> has some (although very limited) security potential and assign a new
>>> id
>>> for the information leak.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> --
>>> Petr Matousek / Red Hat Security Response Team
>>>
>>>
>
>

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