Debian Long Term Support / LTS Security Information / 2015 / Security Information -- DLA-131-1 file

Debian Security Advisory

DLA-131-1 file -- LTS security update

Date Reported:

09 Jan 2015

Affected Packages:

file

Vulnerable:

Yes

Security database references:

In the Debian bugtracking system: Bug 773148.
In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2014-8116, CVE-2014-8117.

More information:

Multiple security issues have been found in file, a tool/library to determine a file type. Processing a malformed file could result in denial of service. Most of the changes are related to parsing ELF files.

As part of the fixes, several limits on aspects of the detection were added or tightened, sometimes resulting in messages like recursion limit exceeded or too many program header sections.

To mitigate such shortcomings, these limits are controllable by a new "-R"/"--recursion" parameter in the file program. Note: A future upgrade for file in squeeze-lts might replace this with the "-P" parameter to keep usage consistent across all distributions.

• CVE-2014-8116

  The ELF parser (readelf.c) allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption or crash).

• CVE-2014-8117

  softmagic.c does not properly limit recursion, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption or crash).

  (no identifier has been assigned so far)

  out-of-bounds memory access

For Debian 6 Squeeze, these issues have been fixed in file version 5.04-5+squeeze9