Security News > 2023 > September > Microsoft Uncovers Flaws in ncurses Library Affecting Linux and macOS Systems

A set of memory corruption flaws have been discovered in the ncurses programming library that could be exploited by threat actors to run malicious code on vulnerable Linux and macOS systems.

"Using environment variable poisoning, attackers could chain these vulnerabilities to elevate privileges and run code in the targeted program's context or perform other malicious actions," Microsoft Threat Intelligence researchers Jonathan Bar Or, Emanuele Cozzi, and Michael Pearse said in a technical report published today.

Microsoft's code auditing and fuzzing found that the ncurses library searches for several environment variables, including TERMINFO, which could be poisoned and combined with the identified flaws to achieve privilege escalation.

"The discovered vulnerabilities could have been exploited by attackers to elevate privileges and run code within a targeted program's context," the researchers said.

"Nonetheless, gaining control of a program through exploiting memory corruption vulnerabilities requires a multi-stage attack."

"The vulnerabilities may have needed to be chained together for an attacker to elevate privileges, such as exploiting the stack information leak to gain arbitrary read primitives along with exploiting the heap overflow to obtain a write primitive."

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2023/09/microsoft-uncovers-flaws-in-ncurses.html