A flaw was found in htmldoc in v1.9.12 and prior. A stack buffer overflow in parse_table() in ps-pdf.cxx may lead to execute arbitrary code and denial of service.
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 |
|---|
| Htmldoc | Htmldoc_project | * | 1.9.12 (including) |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | bionic | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | esm-apps/bionic | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | esm-apps/focal | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | esm-apps/xenial | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | esm-infra-legacy/trusty | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | focal | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | groovy | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | hirsute | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | impish | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | kinetic | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | lunar | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | mantic | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | trusty | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | trusty/esm | * |
| Htmldoc | Ubuntu | upstream | * |
| Htmldoc | 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