CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-1000410

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: Dec 07, 2017 | Modified: Apr 08, 2019
CVSS 3.x
7.5
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
5 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

The Linux kernel version 3.3-rc1 and later is affected by a vulnerability lies in the processing of incoming L2CAP commands - ConfigRequest, and ConfigResponse messages. This info leak is a result of uninitialized stack variables that may be returned to an attacker in their uninitialized state. By manipulating the code flows that precede the handling of these configuration messages, an attacker can also gain some control over which data will be held in the uninitialized stack variables. This can allow him to bypass KASLR, and stack canaries protection - as both pointers and stack canaries may be leaked in this manner. Combining this vulnerability (for example) with the previously disclosed RCE vulnerability in L2CAP configuration parsing (CVE-2017-1000251) may allow an attacker to exploit the RCE against kernels which were built with the above mitigations. These are the specifics of this vulnerability: In the function l2cap_parse_conf_rsp and in the function l2cap_parse_conf_req the following variable is declared without initialization: struct l2cap_conf_efs efs; In addition, when parsing input configuration parameters in both of these functions, the switch case for handling EFS elements may skip the memcpy call that will write to the efs variable: … case L2CAP_CONF_EFS: if (olen == sizeof(efs)) memcpy(&efs, (void *)val, olen); … The olen in the above if is attacker controlled, and regardless of that if, in both of these functions the efs variable would eventually be added to the outgoing configuration request that is being built: l2cap_add_conf_opt(&ptr, L2CAP_CONF_EFS, sizeof(efs), (unsigned long) &efs); So by sending a configuration request, or response, that contains an L2CAP_CONF_EFS element, but with an element length that is not sizeof(efs) - the memcpy to the uninitialized efs variable can be avoided, and the uninitialized variable would be returned to the attacker (16 bytes).

Weakness

The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Linux_kernel Linux 4.15 4.15
Linux_kernel Linux 4.15 4.15
Linux_kernel Linux 4.15 4.15
Linux_kernel Linux 4.15 4.15
Linux_kernel Linux 4.15 4.15
Linux_kernel Linux 4.15 4.15
Linux_kernel Linux 4.15 4.15
Linux_kernel Linux * *

Extended Description

There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:

Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:

Information exposures can occur in different ways:

It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.

Potential Mitigations

  • Compartmentalize the system to have “safe” areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
  • Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

References