CVE-2015-8777: Medium severity gnu c library (glibc) vulnerability

Published Sep 7, 2015
·
Updated

A weakness in the dynamic loader has been found, making glibc of versions prior 2.22.90 affected. LDPOINTERGUARD in the environment is not sanitizaed allowing attacker to easily bypass the pointer guarding protection on set-user-ID and set-group-ID programs.

Reproducing steps available at:

http://hmarco.org/bugs/glibcptrmangleweakness.html

CVE request:

http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2015/q3/504

Other sources

The processenvvars function in elf/rtld.c in the GNU C Library (aka glibc or libc6) before 2.23 allows local users to bypass a pointer-guarding protection mechanism via a zero value of the LDPOINTERGUARD environment variable.

MITRE

Affected Software

1 affected component
GNU glibc<=2.22

Event History

Sep 7, 2015
Data Sourced
via Red Hat·10:13 AM
DescriptionSeverityAffected Software
Jan 20, 2016
CVE Published
via MITRE·02:00 AM
Data Sourced
via MITRE·02:00 AM
Description

Frequently Asked Questions

1

What is the severity of CVE-2015-8777?

CVE-2015-8777 is classified as having a moderate severity level due to its potential to allow local users to bypass security measures.

2

How do I fix CVE-2015-8777?

To fix CVE-2015-8777, upgrade glibc to version 2.23 or later, which addresses the vulnerability.

3

Who is affected by CVE-2015-8777?

CVE-2015-8777 affects local users on systems running glibc versions prior to 2.23.

4

What type of attack is associated with CVE-2015-8777?

CVE-2015-8777 is associated with local privilege escalation attacks that exploit a weakness in the dynamic loader.

5

Is there a workaround for CVE-2015-8777?

While upgrading glibc is the recommended solution, temporarily setting the LD_POINTER_GUARD environment variable to a non-zero value may mitigate the vulnerability.

Contact

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