USN-3367-1: gdb vulnerabilities

26 July 2017

gdb vulnerabilities

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

  • Ubuntu 17.04
  • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Summary

Several security issues were fixed in gdb.

Software Description

  • gdb - GNU Debugger

Details

Hanno Böck discovered that gdb incorrectly handled certain malformed AOUT headers in PE executables. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a specially crafted binary, a remote attacker could use this issue to cause gdb to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. This issue only applied to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. (CVE-2014-8501)

It was discovered that gdb incorrectly handled printing bad bytes in Intel Hex objects. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a specially crafted binary, a remote attacker could use this issue to cause gdb to crash, resulting in a denial of service. This issue only applied to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. (CVE-2014-9939)

It was discovered that gdb incorrectly handled certain string operations. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a specially crafted binary, a remote attacker could use this issue to cause gdb to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. This issue only applied to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. (CVE-2016-2226)

It was discovered that gdb 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 gdb to crash, resulting in a denial of service. This issue only applied to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. (CVE-2016-4487, CVE-2016-4488, CVE-2016-4489, CVE-2016-4490, CVE-2016-4492, CVE-2016-4493, CVE-2016-6131)

It was discovered that gdb 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 gdb to crash, resulting in a denial of service. (CVE-2016-4491)

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 17.04
gdb - 7.12.50.20170314-0ubuntu1.1
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
gdb - 7.11.1-0ubuntu1~16.5
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
gdb - 7.7.1-0ubuntu5~14.04.3

To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References