A flaw was found in the bash functionality that evaluates specially formatted environment variables passed to it from another environment. An attacker could use this feature to override or bypass restrictions to the environment to execute shell commands before restrictions have been applied. Certain services and applications allow remote unauthenticated attackers to provide environment variables, allowing them to exploit this issue.
Acknowledgements:
Red Hat would like to thank Stephane Chazelas for reporting this issue.
GNU Bash through 4.3 bash43-025 processes trailing strings after certain malformed function definitions in the values of environment variables, which allows remote attackers to write to files or possibly have unknown other impact via a crafted environment, as demonstrated by vectors involving the ForceCommand feature in OpenSSH sshd, the modcgi and modcgid modules in the Apache HTTP Server, scripts executed by unspecified DHCP clients, and other situations in which setting the environment occurs across a privilege boundary from Bash execution. NOTE: this vulnerability exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2014-6271.
It was found that polkit could be tricked into bypassing the credential checks for D-Bus requests, elevating the privileges of the requestor to the root user. This flaw could be used by an unprivileged local attacker to, for example, create a new local administrator. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity as well as system availability.
A buffer overflow was discovered in the GNU C Library's dynamic loader ld.so while processing the GLIBCTUNABLES environment variable. This issue could allow a local attacker to use maliciously crafted GLIBCTUNABLES environment variables when launching binaries with SUID permission to execute code with elevated privileges.
A missing bounds check was found in the way OpenSSL handled TLS heartbeat extension packets. This flaw could be used to reveal up to 64k of memory from a connected client or server.
Only 1.0.1 releases of OpenSSL are affected including 1.0.1f (and 1.0.2 betas)
The following upstream commit introduced TLS/DTLS heatbeat support and also this issue:
http://git.openssl.org/gitweb/?p=openssl.git;a=commitdiff;h=4817504