Vulnerabilities > CVE-2018-12934 - Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in GNU Binutils 2.30

047910
CVSS 7.5 - HIGH
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
NONE
Confidentiality impact
NONE
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
HIGH
network
low complexity
gnu
CWE-770
nessus
NVD
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2024-11-21

Summary

remember_Ktype in cplus-dem.c in GNU libiberty, as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.30, allows attackers to trigger excessive memory consumption (aka OOM). This can occur during execution of cxxfilt.

Vulnerable Configurations

Part Description Count
Application
Gnu
1

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • Locate and Exploit Test APIs
    An attacker exploits a sample, demonstration, or test API that is insecure by default and should not be resident on production systems. Some applications include APIs that are intended to allow an administrator to test and refine their domain. These APIs should usually be disabled once a system enters a production environment. Testing APIs may expose a great deal of diagnostic information intended to aid an administrator, but which can also be used by an attacker to further refine their attack. Moreover, testing APIs may not have adequate security controls or may not have undergone rigorous testing since they were not intended for use in production environments. As such, they may have many flaws and vulnerabilities that would allow an attacker to severely disrupt a target.
  • Flooding
    An attacker consumes the resources of a target by rapidly engaging in a large number of interactions with the target. This type of attack generally exposes a weakness in rate limiting or flow control in management of interactions. Since each request consumes some of the target's resources, if a sufficiently large number of requests must be processed at the same time then the target's resources can be exhausted. The degree to which the attack is successful depends upon the volume of requests in relation to the amount of the resource the target has access to, and other mitigating circumstances such as the target's ability to shift load or acquired additional resources to deal with the depletion. The more protected the resource and the greater the quantity of it that must be consumed, the more resources the attacker may need to have at their disposal. A typical TCP/IP flooding attack is a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack where many machines simultaneously make a large number of requests to a target. Against a target with strong defenses and a large pool of resources, many tens of thousands of attacking machines may be required. When successful this attack prevents legitimate users from accessing the service and can cause the target to crash. This attack differs from resource depletion through leaks or allocations in that the latter attacks do not rely on the volume of requests made to the target but instead focus on manipulation of the target's operations. The key factor in a flooding attack is the number of requests the attacker can make in a given period of time. The greater this number, the more likely an attack is to succeed against a given target.
  • Excessive Allocation
    An attacker causes the target to allocate excessive resources to servicing the attackers' request, thereby reducing the resources available for legitimate services and degrading or denying services. Usually, this attack focuses on memory allocation, but any finite resource on the target could be the attacked, including bandwidth, processing cycles, or other resources. This attack does not attempt to force this allocation through a large number of requests (that would be Resource Depletion through Flooding) but instead uses one or a small number of requests that are carefully formatted to force the target to allocate excessive resources to service this request(s). Often this attack takes advantage of a bug in the target to cause the target to allocate resources vastly beyond what would be needed for a normal request. For example, using an Integer Attack, the attacker could cause a variable that controls allocation for a request to hold an excessively large value. Excessive allocation of resources can render a service degraded or unavailable to legitimate users and can even lead to crashing of the target.
  • XML Ping of the Death
    An attacker initiates a resource depletion attack where a large number of small XML messages are delivered at a sufficiently rapid rate to cause a denial of service or crash of the target. Transactions such as repetitive SOAP transactions can deplete resources faster than a simple flooding attack because of the additional resources used by the SOAP protocol and the resources necessary to process SOAP messages. The transactions used are immaterial as long as they cause resource utilization on the target. In other words, this is a normal flooding attack augmented by using messages that will require extra processing on the target.
  • XML Entity Expansion
    An attacker submits an XML document to a target application where the XML document uses nested entity expansion to produce an excessively large output XML. XML allows the definition of macro-like structures that can be used to simplify the creation of complex structures. However, this capability can be abused to create excessive demands on a processor's CPU and memory. A small number of nested expansions can result in an exponential growth in demands on memory.

Nessus

  • NASL familyUbuntu Local Security Checks
    NASL idUBUNTU_USN-4326-1.NASL
    descriptionIt was discovered that libiberty incorrectly handled parsing certain binaries. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a specially crafted binary, a remote attacker could use this issue to cause libiberty to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.
    last seen2020-04-16
    modified2020-04-10
    plugin id135398
    published2020-04-10
    reporterUbuntu Security Notice (C) 2020 Canonical, Inc. / NASL script (C) 2020 and is owned by Tenable, Inc. or an Affiliate thereof.
    sourcehttps://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/135398
    titleUbuntu 16.04 LTS / 18.04 LTS : libiberty vulnerabilities (USN-4326-1)
    code
    #
# (C) Tenable Network Security, Inc.
#
# The descriptive text and package checks in this plugin were
# extracted from Ubuntu Security Notice USN-4326-1. The text 
# itself is copyright (C) Canonical, Inc. See 
# <http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/>. Ubuntu(R) is a registered 
# trademark of Canonical, Inc.
#

include("compat.inc");

if (description)
{
  script_id(135398);
  script_version("1.2");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"plugin_modification_date", value:"2020/04/14");

  script_cve_id("CVE-2018-12641", "CVE-2018-12697", "CVE-2018-12698", "CVE-2018-12934", "CVE-2018-17794", "CVE-2018-17985", "CVE-2018-18483", "CVE-2018-18484", "CVE-2018-18700", "CVE-2018-18701", "CVE-2018-9138", "CVE-2019-14250", "CVE-2019-9070", "CVE-2019-9071");
  script_xref(name:"USN", value:"4326-1");

  script_name(english:"Ubuntu 16.04 LTS / 18.04 LTS : libiberty vulnerabilities (USN-4326-1)");
  script_summary(english:"Checks dpkg output for updated package.");

  script_set_attribute(
    attribute:"synopsis", 
    value:"The remote Ubuntu host is missing a security-related patch."
  );
  script_set_attribute(
    attribute:"description", 
    value:
"It was discovered that libiberty incorrectly handled parsing certain
binaries. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a
specially crafted binary, a remote attacker could use this issue to
cause libiberty to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or
possibly execute arbitrary code.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding
description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable
has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible
without introducing additional issues."
  );
  script_set_attribute(
    attribute:"see_also",
    value:"https://usn.ubuntu.com/4326-1/"
  );
  script_set_attribute(
    attribute:"solution", 
    value:"Update the affected libiberty-dev package."
  );
  script_set_cvss_base_vector("CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P");
  script_set_cvss_temporal_vector("CVSS2#E:U/RL:OF/RC:C");
  script_set_cvss3_base_vector("CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H");
  script_set_cvss3_temporal_vector("CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"exploitability_ease", value:"No known exploits are available");

  script_set_attribute(attribute:"plugin_type", value:"local");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"cpe", value:"p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:libiberty-dev");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"cpe", value:"cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:16.04");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"cpe", value:"cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:18.04:-:lts");

  script_set_attribute(attribute:"vuln_publication_date", value:"2018/03/30");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"patch_publication_date", value:"2020/04/08");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"plugin_publication_date", value:"2020/04/10");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"generated_plugin", value:"current");
  script_end_attributes();

  script_category(ACT_GATHER_INFO);
  script_copyright(english:"Ubuntu Security Notice (C) 2020 Canonical, Inc. / NASL script (C) 2020 and is owned by Tenable, Inc. or an Affiliate thereof.");
  script_family(english:"Ubuntu Local Security Checks");

  script_dependencies("ssh_get_info.nasl");
  script_require_keys("Host/cpu", "Host/Ubuntu", "Host/Ubuntu/release", "Host/Debian/dpkg-l");

  exit(0);
}


include("audit.inc");
include("ubuntu.inc");
include("misc_func.inc");

if ( ! get_kb_item("Host/local_checks_enabled") ) audit(AUDIT_LOCAL_CHECKS_NOT_ENABLED);
release = get_kb_item("Host/Ubuntu/release");
if ( isnull(release) ) audit(AUDIT_OS_NOT, "Ubuntu");
release = chomp(release);
if (! preg(pattern:"^(16\.04|18\.04)$", string:release)) audit(AUDIT_OS_NOT, "Ubuntu 16.04 / 18.04", "Ubuntu " + release);
if ( ! get_kb_item("Host/Debian/dpkg-l") ) audit(AUDIT_PACKAGE_LIST_MISSING);

cpu = get_kb_item("Host/cpu");
if (isnull(cpu)) audit(AUDIT_UNKNOWN_ARCH);
if ("x86_64" >!< cpu && cpu !~ "^i[3-6]86$") audit(AUDIT_LOCAL_CHECKS_NOT_IMPLEMENTED, "Ubuntu", cpu);

flag = 0;

if (ubuntu_check(osver:"16.04", pkgname:"libiberty-dev", pkgver:"20160215-1ubuntu0.3")) flag++;
if (ubuntu_check(osver:"18.04", pkgname:"libiberty-dev", pkgver:"20170913-1ubuntu0.1")) flag++;

if (flag)
{
  security_report_v4(
    port       : 0,
    severity   : SECURITY_WARNING,
    extra      : ubuntu_report_get()
  );
  exit(0);
}
else
{
  tested = ubuntu_pkg_tests_get();
  if (tested) audit(AUDIT_PACKAGE_NOT_AFFECTED, tested);
  else audit(AUDIT_PACKAGE_NOT_INSTALLED, "libiberty-dev");
}
  • NASL familyUbuntu Local Security Checks
    NASL idUBUNTU_USN-4336-1.NASL
    descriptionIt was discovered that GNU binutils contained a large number of security issues. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a specially crafted file, a remote attacker could cause GNU binutils to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.
    last seen2020-04-30
    modified2020-04-24
    plugin id135966
    published2020-04-24
    reporterUbuntu Security Notice (C) 2020 Canonical, Inc. / NASL script (C) 2020 and is owned by Tenable, Inc. or an Affiliate thereof.
    sourcehttps://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/135966
    titleUbuntu 18.04 LTS : binutils vulnerabilities (USN-4336-1)
    code
    #
# (C) Tenable Network Security, Inc.
#
# The descriptive text and package checks in this plugin were
# extracted from Ubuntu Security Notice USN-4336-1. The text 
# itself is copyright (C) Canonical, Inc. See 
# <http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/>. Ubuntu(R) is a registered 
# trademark of Canonical, Inc.
#

include("compat.inc");

if (description)
{
  script_id(135966);
  script_version("1.2");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"plugin_modification_date", value:"2020/04/28");

  script_cve_id("CVE-2018-1000876", "CVE-2018-10372", "CVE-2018-10373", "CVE-2018-10534", "CVE-2018-10535", "CVE-2018-12641", "CVE-2018-12697", "CVE-2018-12698", "CVE-2018-12699", "CVE-2018-12700", "CVE-2018-12934", "CVE-2018-13033", "CVE-2018-17358", "CVE-2018-17359", "CVE-2018-17360", "CVE-2018-17794", "CVE-2018-17985", "CVE-2018-18309", "CVE-2018-18483", "CVE-2018-18484", "CVE-2018-18605", "CVE-2018-18606", "CVE-2018-18607", "CVE-2018-18700", "CVE-2018-18701", "CVE-2018-19931", "CVE-2018-19932", "CVE-2018-20002", "CVE-2018-20623", "CVE-2018-20651", "CVE-2018-20671", "CVE-2018-8945", "CVE-2018-9138", "CVE-2019-12972", "CVE-2019-14250", "CVE-2019-14444", "CVE-2019-17450", "CVE-2019-17451", "CVE-2019-9070", "CVE-2019-9071", "CVE-2019-9073", "CVE-2019-9074", "CVE-2019-9075", "CVE-2019-9077");
  script_xref(name:"USN", value:"4336-1");

  script_name(english:"Ubuntu 18.04 LTS : binutils vulnerabilities (USN-4336-1)");
  script_summary(english:"Checks dpkg output for updated packages.");

  script_set_attribute(
    attribute:"synopsis", 
    value:
"The remote Ubuntu host is missing one or more security-related
patches."
  );
  script_set_attribute(
    attribute:"description", 
    value:
"It was discovered that GNU binutils contained a large number of
security issues. If a user or automated system were tricked into
processing a specially crafted file, a remote attacker could cause GNU
binutils to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly
execute arbitrary code.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding
description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable
has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible
without introducing additional issues."
  );
  script_set_attribute(
    attribute:"see_also",
    value:"https://usn.ubuntu.com/4336-1/"
  );
  script_set_attribute(
    attribute:"solution", 
    value:"Update the affected binutils and / or binutils-multiarch packages."
  );
  script_set_cvss_base_vector("CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P");
  script_set_cvss_temporal_vector("CVSS2#E:U/RL:OF/RC:C");
  script_set_cvss3_base_vector("CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H");
  script_set_cvss3_temporal_vector("CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"exploitability_ease", value:"No known exploits are available");

  script_set_attribute(attribute:"plugin_type", value:"local");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"cpe", value:"p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:binutils");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"cpe", value:"p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:binutils-multiarch");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"cpe", value:"cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:18.04:-:lts");

  script_set_attribute(attribute:"vuln_publication_date", value:"2018/03/22");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"patch_publication_date", value:"2020/04/22");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"plugin_publication_date", value:"2020/04/24");
  script_set_attribute(attribute:"generated_plugin", value:"current");
  script_end_attributes();

  script_category(ACT_GATHER_INFO);
  script_copyright(english:"Ubuntu Security Notice (C) 2020 Canonical, Inc. / NASL script (C) 2020 and is owned by Tenable, Inc. or an Affiliate thereof.");
  script_family(english:"Ubuntu Local Security Checks");

  script_dependencies("ssh_get_info.nasl");
  script_require_keys("Host/cpu", "Host/Ubuntu", "Host/Ubuntu/release", "Host/Debian/dpkg-l");

  exit(0);
}


include("audit.inc");
include("ubuntu.inc");
include("misc_func.inc");

if ( ! get_kb_item("Host/local_checks_enabled") ) audit(AUDIT_LOCAL_CHECKS_NOT_ENABLED);
release = get_kb_item("Host/Ubuntu/release");
if ( isnull(release) ) audit(AUDIT_OS_NOT, "Ubuntu");
release = chomp(release);
if (! preg(pattern:"^(18\.04)$", string:release)) audit(AUDIT_OS_NOT, "Ubuntu 18.04", "Ubuntu " + release);
if ( ! get_kb_item("Host/Debian/dpkg-l") ) audit(AUDIT_PACKAGE_LIST_MISSING);

cpu = get_kb_item("Host/cpu");
if (isnull(cpu)) audit(AUDIT_UNKNOWN_ARCH);
if ("x86_64" >!< cpu && cpu !~ "^i[3-6]86$") audit(AUDIT_LOCAL_CHECKS_NOT_IMPLEMENTED, "Ubuntu", cpu);

flag = 0;

if (ubuntu_check(osver:"18.04", pkgname:"binutils", pkgver:"2.30-21ubuntu1~18.04.3")) flag++;
if (ubuntu_check(osver:"18.04", pkgname:"binutils-multiarch", pkgver:"2.30-21ubuntu1~18.04.3")) flag++;

if (flag)
{
  security_report_v4(
    port       : 0,
    severity   : SECURITY_HOLE,
    extra      : ubuntu_report_get()
  );
  exit(0);
}
else
{
  tested = ubuntu_pkg_tests_get();
  if (tested) audit(AUDIT_PACKAGE_NOT_AFFECTED, tested);
  else audit(AUDIT_PACKAGE_NOT_INSTALLED, "binutils / binutils-multiarch");
}

References