CVE-2017-10972

Uninitialized data in endianness conversion in the XEvent handling of the X.Org X Server before 2017-06-19 allowed authenticated malicious users to access potentially privileged data from the X server.

Weakness

The product does not initialize or incorrectly initializes a resource, which might leave the resource in an unexpected state when it is accessed or used.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Use a language that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
• For example, in Java, if the programmer does not explicitly initialize a variable, then the code could produce a compile-time error (if the variable is local) or automatically initialize the variable to the default value for the variable’s type. In Perl, if explicit initialization is not performed, then a default value of undef is assigned, which is interpreted as 0, false, or an equivalent value depending on the context in which the variable is accessed.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/26.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/29.html

References

• http://www.debian.org/security/2017/dsa-3905
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/99543
• https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1035283
• https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=05442de962d3dc624f79fc1a00eca3ffc5489ced
• http://www.debian.org/security/2017/dsa-3905
• http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/99543
• https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1035283
• https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=05442de962d3dc624f79fc1a00eca3ffc5489ced