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Overview
This week we discuss compiler warnings as build errors in the Linux kernel, plus we look at security updates for HAProxy, GNU cpio, PySAML2, mod-auth-mellon and more.
This week in Ubuntu Security Updates
15 unique CVEs addressed
[USN-5051-4] OpenSSL regression [00:51]
- 1 CVEs addressed in Trusty ESM (14.04 ESM)
- Episode 129
- Original backport of patch contained a typo which introduced a regression where ASN1_STRINGs would fail to print in some cases
[USN-5062-1] Linux kernel vulnerability [01:20]
- 1 CVEs addressed in Trusty ESM (14.04 ESM), Xenial ESM (16.04 ESM)
- AMD specific issue in KVM subsystem with nested virtualisation - would fail to validate particular operations which could be performed by a guest VM - in this case would allow a guest to enable the Advanced Virtual Interrupt Controller for a nested VM (ie L2 VM) - this would then allow the L2 VM to write to host memory -> code execution on the host
[USN-5063-1] HAProxy vulnerabilities [02:40]
- 1 CVEs addressed in Focal (20.04 LTS), Hirsute (21.04)
- Integer overflow in handling of header name lengths - most significant bit of header name length could slip into the LSB of header value length - could then craft a valid request that would inject a dummy content-length on input, this would then be reproduced on the output as well as the original correct header length - can then get a “blind” request smuggling attack since the extra request bypasses ACL checking etc
[USN-5064-1] GNU cpio vulnerability [04:13]
- 1 CVEs addressed in Bionic (18.04 LTS), Focal (20.04 LTS), Hirsute (21.04)
- Integer overflow -> heap buffer overflow in the handling of pattern files - this allows to specify a file which contains a list of patterns to match against filenames in the cpio archive which should be extracted - is not clear if can easily abuse this as a remote attacker since would need to be able to supply a crafted pattern file and have this get used but these are not often used in practice
[USN-5065-1] Open vSwitch vulnerability [05:08]
- 1 CVEs addressed in Focal (20.04 LTS), Hirsute (21.04)
- UAF in decoding of RAW_ENCAP actions - remote attacker could craft one -> crash / RCE..?
[USN-5066-1, USN-5066-2] PySAML2 vulnerability [05:39]
- 1 CVEs addressed in Xenial ESM (16.04 ESM), Bionic (18.04 LTS), Focal (20.04 LTS), Hirsute (21.04)
- pysaml2 uses xmlsec1 binary to validate cryptographic signatures on SAML documents
- By default xmlsec will accept any type of key found in the document to verify the signature - so an attacker could embed their own signature using just a HMAC and this would get validated as correct without even consulting the X509 cert which should be used to validate the document - simple fix to just change the CLI arguments to xmlsec1 to specify that it should validate based on x509 certs
[USN-5067-1] SSSD vulnerabilities [07:06]
- 4 CVEs addressed in Bionic (18.04 LTS), Focal (20.04 LTS), Hirsute (21.04)
- Possible shell command injection via the sssctl binary using the logs-fetch and cache-expire subcommands - if could trick root into running crafted commands could then get root… - was as a result of using the system() syscall which evaluates a string to the shell - so allows shell command injection directly - was fixed to instead use fork() + execvp() on an array of arguments - which doesn’t go via the shell to run the specified subcommand
- common pattern for security vulns, something we specifically look for when auditing packages as part of the security review for MIRs
[USN-5069-1] mod-auth-mellon vulnerability [08:54]
- 1 CVEs addressed in Bionic (18.04 LTS), Focal (20.04 LTS)
- SAML2 auth module for Apache
- Failed to filter URLS that start with
///- an attacker could craft a URL that specified a particular URL via theReturnToparameter and this would then automatically redirect the user to that crafted URL - so could be used for phishing attacks that look more trustworthy. ie. an attacker creates a phishing site that copies the victim site at their own domain. they then send an email to a user asking them to login and they specify a URL to the real victim site but with theReturnToparameter set to their own site - a user looking at this URL will see it specifies the real site so won’t be concerned - when they visit it they get automatically redirected to the victim site - so if they don’t then check the URL they will start logging into the fake phishing site and not the real one - fixed to just reject these URLs so they don’t get abused by the redirect process
[USN-5068-1] GD library vulnerabilities [10:24]
- 4 CVEs addressed in Trusty ESM (14.04 ESM), Xenial ESM (16.04 ESM), Bionic (18.04 LTS), Focal (20.04 LTS), Hirsute (21.04)
- Crafted image files -> OOB read / write - crash / code exec
- One in TGA handling but others in the proprietary GD/GD2 formats which upstream say is now deprecated so shouldn’t get a CVE - recommend if you are processing GD/GD2 image files from untrusted sources that you stop as upstream may stop issuing updates for these / may not get CVEs
Goings on in Ubuntu Security Community
Linux kernel enables -Werror [11:33]
- Initially enabled by default, in response to patches from Kees Cook @ Google which introduced a bunch of new warnings - Linus wants a clean build
- Lots of push back since this then immediately broke a heap of CI systems as there a lots of existing bits of kernel code that generates warnings - and depending on what config options you enable you compile different bits of code so can see or not see various warnings - and hence different architectures etc - even having a different locale / LANG setting can result in different compiler warnings as Kees found due to the nature of some of the tests
- Given the huge codebase with so many different configurations is almost impossible to test them all and find all the various warnings, let alone actually fix them
- For years folks have been trying to drive down the warnings but is still a hard and ongoing effort
- As such, ended up changing this to a suggestion from Marco Elver (also at
Google) to enable this when
COMPILE_TESTis enabled - this used as a flag to tell the kernel to compile everything even if it is not being used - and is then often used by CI systems / developers which explicitly want to compile everything who work on detecting new warnings - Is a lofty goal and is very useful from a security PoV and is illustrative of many real world efforts that try and introduce static analysis etc for an existing codebase
- Immediately get a high number of ’errors’ now that need to be addressed - was fine before? - so how to introduce these in a way that doesn’t impose a huge upfront cost but still incentivizes fixing them over time and allows to detect new issues
- Is good to see a focus on this in a more tangible way from upstream as compiler warnings are there for a reason and should not be ignored
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