Calling gethostbyaddr or gethostbyaddrr with a configured nsswitch.conf that specifies the library's DNS backend in the GNU C library version 2.34 to version 2.43 could result in an invalid DNS hostname being returned to the caller in violation of the DNS specification.

Assertion failure in the DNS stub resolver with a long search domain

A time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition in the dynamic loader (ld.so) of the GNU C Library (glibc) versions 2.14 through 2.44 allows a local attacker to escalate privileges. When expanding $ORIGIN in DTRPATH for setuid/setgid (ATSECURE) programs, glibc validates the lexically normalized search path against the trusted directories but then opens the raw, un-normalized path. On systems where the Linux fs.protectedhardlinks sysctl is disabled, a local attacker who hard-links such a program into an attacker-controlled directory and wins a race to replace an intermediate path component with a symbolic link can direct the loader outside the trusted directory, causing it to load an attacker-controlled shared object and execute arbitrary code with the elevated privileges of the program.

Exploitation requires an installed setuid or setgid binary whose DTRPATH uses $ORIGIN followed by ".." traversal that normalizes into a trusted directory, and the ability to hard-link that binary and win the race by swapping a path component for a symbolic link. Major Linux-based OS distributions ship with fs.protectedhardlinks enabled by default and mitigate the vulnerability.

Passing an effectively empty string to the ,ccs= syntax extension of the mode argument in the fopen function in the GNU C Library version 2.45 or earlier may result in a heap buffer overflow when the mode string input to the function is attacker controlled.

This usage pattern is not seen in applications in common GNU/Linux distributions and applications that process user-supplied values for ccs should not pass them through without validation.

The deprecated functions nsprintrrf, nsprintrr and fpnquery in the GNU C Library version 2.2 and newer fail to validate the RDATA content against the RDATA length in a DNS response when processing LOC, CERT, TKEY or TSIG records, which may allow an attacker to craft a DNS response, causing a target application to crash or read uninitialized memory.

These functions are for application debugging only and hence not in the path of code executed by the DNS resolver. Further, they have been deprecated since version 2.34 and should not be used by any new applications. Applications should consider porting away from these interfaces since they may be removed in future versions.