Episode 16

Ubuntu Security Podcast

Overview

Last episode for 2018! This week we look at CVEs in lxml, CUPS, pixman, FreeRDP & more, plus we discuss the security of home routers as evaluated by C-ITL.

This week in Ubuntu Security Updates

21 unique CVEs addressed

[USN-3841-1, USN-3841-2] lxml vulnerability

• 1 CVEs addressed in Precise ESM, Trusty, Xenial, Bionic
  • CVE-2018-19787
• Popular XML/HTML parser for Python
• Tries to remove clean input document and remove links (to say embedded javascript code) - but doesn’t account for links containing escaped characters - so link could persist
• Similar to CVE-2014-3146
  • In this case tried to account for whitespace in links but didn’t include all possible whitespace characters

[USN-3842-1] CUPS vulnerability

• 1 CVEs addressed in Trusty, Xenial, Bionic, Cosmic
  • CVE-2018-4700
• Session cookies used for authentication to CUPS web interface used only the current time in seconds as a seed for the relatively predictable PRNG
  • Easy to bruteforce / guess
  • Fix ensures to use current time value including microseconds
  • Still using relatively predictable PRNG - should use /dev/urandom etc

[USN-3837-2] poppler regression

• 2 CVEs addressed in Trusty, Xenial, Bionic, Cosmic
  • CVE-2018-19149
  • CVE-2018-16646
• Previous poppler update (Episode 15) - fix missed a previous commit and so regressed (crash on opening certain PDF files)

[USN-3843-1, USN-3843-2] pixman vulnerability

• 1 CVEs addressed in Precise ESM, Trusty
  • CVE-2015-5297
• Low level library for pixel manipulation (used by X, Wayland, Qemu etc)
• Pointer overflow leading to stack-based buffer overflow in computing bounds of pixel buffers
  • Did include a check to see if was inside bounds, BUT didn’t account for possible overflow in arithmetic before the check
  • Need to check for possible overflow before doing arithmetic and comparison

[USN-3844-1] Firefox vulnerabilities

• 10 CVEs addressed in Trusty, Xenial, Bionic, Cosmic
  • CVE-2018-18497
  • CVE-2018-18495
  • CVE-2018-18498
  • CVE-2018-18494
  • CVE-2018-18493
  • CVE-2018-18492
  • CVE-2018-17466
  • CVE-2018-12407
  • CVE-2018-12406
  • CVE-2018-12405
• Firefox 64 - multiple security vulnerabilities fixed
  • Buffer overflows, UAFs, same-origin-policy violation, webextensions able to violate restrictions, various memory safety / corruption bugs
  • https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2018-29/

[USN-3845-1] FreeRDP vulnerabilities

• 6 CVEs addressed in Trusty, Xenial, Bionic, Cosmic
  • CVE-2018-8789
  • CVE-2018-8788
  • CVE-2018-8787
  • CVE-2018-8786
  • CVE-2018-8785
  • CVE-2018-8784
• Eyal Itkin discovered multiple vulnerabilities in FreeRDP - not all affect all releases (some too old to contain affected code)
• Various heap-based buffer overflows (crash -> DoS / RCE?)
• Out-of-bounds read (crash -> DoS)

Goings on in Linux Security Community

Linux on MIPS and home routers

• Cyber-ITL (Independent Testing Lab) analysed a number of home routers for basic security hardening features
  • ASLR, DEP (non-executable stack), RELRO
  • Mix of MIPS and ARM devices
  • Compared against Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x86_64 (general hardening)
  • Most found to have minimal hardening features enabled
  • https://cyber-itl.org/assets/papers/2018/build_safety_of_software_in_28_popular_home_routers.pdf
  • Also found Linux kernel on MIPS either has executable stack (until 2016) due to FP emulation code, or since then has no executable stack but has a RWX segment at a fixed location, which can be used to bypass DEP / ASLR
    • Ubuntu does not support MIPS

Final episode for 2018

• This is the last episode for 2018, on leave for the next 3 weeks
• Next episode will be from Cape Town in 2019 during week of 14th January with some special guests… :)

Get in contact

• [e-mail]
• #ubuntu-security on the Libera.Chat IRC network
• @ubuntu_sec on twitter