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CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2016-9603

Heap-based Buffer Overflow

Published: Jul 27, 2018 | Modified: Nov 21, 2024
CVSS 3.x
9.9
CRITICAL
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS 2.x
9 HIGH
AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:C/I:C/A:C
RedHat/V2
4.9 IMPORTANT
AV:A/AC:M/Au:S/C:P/I:P/A:P
RedHat/V3
5.5 IMPORTANT
CVSS:3.0/AV:A/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:L
Ubuntu
MEDIUM
Additional information
NVDhttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-9603
CWEhttps://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/122.html

A heap buffer overflow flaw was found in QEMUs Cirrus CLGD 54xx VGA emulators VNC display driver support before 2.9; the issue could occur when a VNC client attempted to update its display after a VGA operation is performed by a guest. A privileged user/process inside a guest could use this flaw to crash the QEMU process or, potentially, execute arbitrary code on the host with privileges of the QEMU process.

Weakness

A heap overflow condition is a buffer overflow, where the buffer that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory, generally meaning that the buffer was allocated using a routine such as malloc().

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Qemu Qemu * 2.9.0 (excluding)
Qemu Ubuntu devel *
Qemu Ubuntu trusty *
Qemu Ubuntu xenial *
Qemu Ubuntu yakkety *
Qemu Ubuntu zesty *
Xen Ubuntu precise *
Xen Ubuntu trusty *
Xen Ubuntu upstream *
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 RedHat qemu-kvm-2:0.12.1.2-2.503.el6_9.3 *
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 RedHat qemu-kvm-10:1.5.3-126.el7_3.6 *
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5.0 (Icehouse) for RHEL 6 RedHat qemu-kvm-rhev-2:0.12.1.2-2.503.el6_9.3 *
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5.0 (Icehouse) for RHEL 7 RedHat qemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.6.0-28.el7_3.9 *
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6.0 (Juno) for RHEL 7 RedHat qemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.6.0-28.el7_3.9 *
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7.0 (Kilo) for RHEL 7 RedHat qemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.6.0-28.el7_3.9 *
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10.0 (Newton) RedHat qemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.6.0-28.el7_3.9 *
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8.0 (Liberty) RedHat qemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.6.0-28.el7_3.9 *
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9.0 (Mitaka) RedHat qemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.6.0-28.el7_3.9 *
Red Hat Virtualization 4 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 RedHat qemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.6.0-28.el7_3.9 *
RHEV 3.X Hypervisor and Agents for RHEL-6 RedHat qemu-kvm-rhev-2:0.12.1.2-2.503.el6_9.3 *
RHEV 3.X Hypervisor and Agents for RHEL-7 RedHat qemu-kvm-rhev-10:2.6.0-28.el7_3.9 *

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

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