A heap overflow flaw was found in the Linux kernel, all versions 3.x.x and 4.x.x before 4.18.0, in Marvell WiFi chip driver. The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to cause a system crash, resulting in a denial of service, or execute arbitrary code. The highest threat with this vulnerability is with the availability of the system. If code execution occurs, the code will run with the permissions of root. This will affect both confidentiality and integrity of files on the system.
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 |
| Linux_kernel |
Linux |
3.15 (including) |
3.16.83 (excluding) |
| Linux_kernel |
Linux |
3.17 (including) |
4.4.217 (excluding) |
| Linux_kernel |
Linux |
4.5 (including) |
4.9.217 (excluding) |
| Linux_kernel |
Linux |
4.10 (including) |
4.14.164 (excluding) |
| Linux_kernel |
Linux |
4.15 (including) |
4.19.95 (excluding) |
| Linux_kernel |
Linux |
4.20 (including) |
5.4.11 (excluding) |
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