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Date: Fri, 3 May 2013 12:31:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jan Lieskovsky <jlieskov@...hat.com>
To: esr@...rsus.com, Kurt Seifried <kseifried@...hat.com>
Cc: "Steven M. Christey" <coley@...us.mitre.org>,
        Miroslav Lichvar <mlichvar@...hat.com>,
        oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: CVE Request -- gpsd 3.9 fixing a denial of
 service flaw


Thank you for your time && reply, Eric.

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@...rsus.com>
> To: "Kurt Seifried" <kseifried@...hat.com>
> Cc: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com, "Jan Lieskovsky" <jlieskov@...hat.com>, "Steven M. Christey"
> <coley@...us.mitre.org>, "Miroslav Lichvar" <mlichvar@...hat.com>
> Sent: Thursday, May 2, 2013 9:41:51 PM
> Subject: Re: [oss-security] CVE Request -- gpsd 3.9 fixing a denial of service flaw
> 
> Kurt Seifried <kseifried@...hat.com>:
> > On 05/02/2013 03:58 AM, Jan Lieskovsky wrote:
> > > @Eric - Eric, could you please help us to solve this doubt? (which
> > > of the patches is the correct one to fix the above mentioned DoS /
> > > security issue)
> 
> There are two critical patches which solve two different DoSes (well,
> one certain and one potential).  Yes, it's a strange coincidence that
> both bugs were characterized at almost the same time after we haven't
> had a crash bug since 2007.
> 
> The crash bug was in the NMEA driver.  There's particular kind of malformed
> packet, sometimes emitted by SiRFStar-III receivers, that looks like this:
> 
> $GPGGA,030130$GPGLL,2638.1728,N,08011.3893,W,030131.000,A,A*41\r\n
> 
> See the incomplete GGA without trailing \r\n  at the front?  Usually
> that was harmless and would be silently discarded. Under rare circumstances
> it could core dump (but not any more, I now have a regression test to check
> this case).
> 
> That fix was commit dd9c3c2830cb8f8fd8491ce68c82698dc5538f50.

So this is observed / experienced DoS, right? Kurt, assuming the 
CVE-2013-2038 identifier:
  http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2013/05/02/17

has been assigned to this sub-case, correct?

> 
> The potential crash/DoS was in the AIS driver.
> 
> The first stage of what it does is un-armor an AIVDM ASCII packet
> representation into an equivalent binary packet which is then examined
> for data at specific bit offsets.
> 
> The un-armoring logic was not properly bounds-checked, potentially
> opening up a hole. In theory, an overlong armored packet could be
> crafted to overrun the binary-packet buffer.
> 
> I'm not sure that one was exploitable; there are other properties of
> the code (notably the bounds-checked maximum length of the AIVDM ASCII
> packet buffer) that seem to guarantee the end of the binary packet
> buffer could never be reached.

Meaning this wouldn't be a DoS attack vector? (asking to know if a
separate / second CVE identifier is needed for this case yet, or not)

> 
> I put in a check anyway, because (a) I could be wrong about that, (b)
> supposing I'm right, that invariant could get silently broken by a future
> code change.
> 
> That was commit 08edc49d8f63c75bfdfb480b083b0d960310f94f, responding
> to Savannah bug #38511.

Application of the patch looks reasonable. Just would be good to know
if it was applied just like a preventive measure (no DoS right now, just
prevent its [possible] occurrence in the future in case of code change)
or if under certain circumstances it might be used to DoS gpsd too?

> 
> Note: neither of these have privilege-escalation possibilities.  gpsd
> needs root to initialize, but drops it long before either of these
> code defects could fire.

Ok, good.

Thank you && Regards, Jan.
--
Jan iankko Lieskovsky / Red Hat Security Response Team

> 
> If you have any other questions, do not hesitate to ask.
> --
> 		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
> 

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