It is possible to crash or redirect the execution flow of the ClickHouse server process from an unauthenticated vector by sending a specially crafted request to the ClickHouse server native interface. This redirection is limited to what is available within a 256-byte range of memory at the time of execution, and no known remote code execution (RCE) code has been produced or exploited.
Fixes have been merged to all currently supported version of ClickHouse. If you are maintaining your own forked version of ClickHouse or using an older version and cannot upgrade, the fix for this vulnerability can be found in this commit https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/64024 .
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().
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