A flaw was found in cairos image-compositor.c in all versions prior to 1.17.4. This flaw allows an attacker who can provide a crafted input file to cairos image-compositor (for example, by convincing a user to open a file in an application using cairo, or if an application uses cairo on untrusted input) to cause a stack buffer overflow -> out-of-bounds WRITE. The highest impact from this vulnerability is to confidentiality, integrity, as well as system availability.
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 |
| Cairo |
Cairographics |
* |
1.17.4 (excluding) |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 |
RedHat |
cairo-0:1.15.12-6.el8 |
* |
| Cairo |
Ubuntu |
bionic |
* |
| Cairo |
Ubuntu |
esm-infra/xenial |
* |
| Cairo |
Ubuntu |
groovy |
* |
| Cairo |
Ubuntu |
hirsute |
* |
| Cairo |
Ubuntu |
trusty |
* |
| Cairo |
Ubuntu |
upstream |
* |
| Cairo |
Ubuntu |
xenial |
* |
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