CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2014-8184

Stack-based Buffer Overflow

Published: Aug 02, 2019 | Modified: Mar 03, 2023
CVSS 3.x
7.8
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS 2.x
6.8 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
7.8 MODERATE
CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Ubuntu
MEDIUM

A vulnerability was found in liblouis, versions 2.5.x before 2.5.4. A stack-based buffer overflow was found in findTable() in liblouis. An attacker could create a malicious file that would cause applications that use liblouis (such as Orca) to crash, or potentially execute arbitrary code when opened.

Weakness

A stack-based buffer overflow condition is a condition where the buffer being overwritten is allocated on the stack (i.e., is a local variable or, rarely, a parameter to a function).

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Liblouis Liblouis 2.5.0 (including) 2.5.4 (excluding)
Liblouis Ubuntu trusty *
Liblouis Ubuntu upstream *
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 RedHat liblouis-0:2.5.2-11.el7_4 *

Potential Mitigations

  • Use automatic buffer overflow detection mechanisms that are offered by certain compilers or compiler extensions. Examples include: the Microsoft Visual Studio /GS flag, Fedora/Red Hat FORTIFY_SOURCE GCC flag, StackGuard, and ProPolice, which provide various mechanisms including canary-based detection and range/index checking.
  • D3-SFCV (Stack Frame Canary Validation) from D3FEND [REF-1334] discusses canary-based detection in detail.
  • Run or compile the software using features or extensions that randomly arrange the positions of a program’s executable and libraries in memory. Because this makes the addresses unpredictable, it can prevent an attacker from reliably jumping to exploitable code.
  • Examples include Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) [REF-58] [REF-60] and Position-Independent Executables (PIE) [REF-64]. Imported modules may be similarly realigned if their default memory addresses conflict with other modules, in a process known as “rebasing” (for Windows) and “prelinking” (for Linux) [REF-1332] using randomly generated addresses. ASLR for libraries cannot be used in conjunction with prelink since it would require relocating the libraries at run-time, defeating the whole purpose of prelinking.
  • For more information on these techniques see D3-SAOR (Segment Address Offset Randomization) from D3FEND [REF-1335].

References