Vulnerability Assessment & Network Security Forums

If through a vulnerability assessment, a network security issue is detected for the vulnerability below, applying the appropriate security patches in a timely matter is very important. If you have detected that your system has already been compromised, following CERT's Network Security recovery document will assist with recommended steps for system recovery.

Home >> Browse Vulnerability Assessment Database >> Red Hat Local Security Checks >> RHSA-2003-249: glibc

Vulnerability Assessment Details

RHSA-2003-249: glibc

Vulnerability Assessment Summary
Check for the version of the glibc packages

Detailed Explanation for this Vulnerability Assessment

Updated glibc packages that fix a number of bugs as well as a buffer
overflow issue are now available.

The GNU libc package (known as glibc) contains the standard C libraries
used by applications.

A bug in the getgrouplist function can cause a buffer overflow if
the size of the group list is too small to hold all the user's groups.
This overflow can cause segmentation faults in user applications, which may
have security implications, depending on the application in question. This
vulnerability exists only when an administrator has placed a user in a
number of groups larger than that expected by an application. Therefore,
there is no risk in instances where users are members of few groups. The
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned
the name CVE-2003-0689 to this issue.

In addition, a number of other bugs in glibc have been fixed:

- An error prevented gdb from correctly debugging programs linked to
libpthread.

- A race condition existed in the malloc routine for IA64 platforms, which
could cause memory corruption.

- An error in pthread_spinlocks prevents spinlocks from functioning
correctly on IA64 platforms.

All users should upgrade to these errata packages, which contain patches to
the glibc libraries correcting these issues.

Solution : http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2003-249.html
Network Security Threat Level: High

Networks Security ID:

Vulnerability Assessment Copyright: This script is Copyright (C) 2004 Tenable Network Security

Cables, Connectors