J-Security Center

Title: SystemTap Unprivileged Mode Multiple Denial Of Service Vulnerabilities

Severity: MODERATE

Description:

SystemTap is an application that includes a command-line interface and scripting language for analyzing a running Linux kernel.

SystemTap is prone to these vulnerabilities:

1. A denial-of-service vulnerability occurs because an overly large number of parameters provided to the 'print*()' function can trigger a kernel stack overflow.

2. A denial-of-service vulnerability occurs because specially crafted DWARF information can trigger a kernel stack-frame overflow.

3. A denial-of-service vulnerability may be triggered by an infinite loop because of missing upper-bound checks on the size of the unwind table and the size of each of the CIE/CFI records.

Note that these issues may be exploited if the superuser has previously activated '--unprivileged' mode. This mode is not enabled by default.

Exploiting these issues may allow attackers to crash the application, denying service to legitimate users. Attackers may be able to leverage some of these vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code, but this has not been confirmed.

SystemTap 1.0 is vulnerable; other versions may also be affected.

Affected Products:

  • SystemTap SystemTap 0.0.20080705
  • SystemTap SystemTap 0.0.20090314
  • SystemTap SystemTap 1.0

References:

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