Gentoo Linux Advisory: libmcrypt

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GENTOO LINUX SECURITY ANNOUNCEMENT 200301-4
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PACKAGE : libmcrypt
SUMMARY : buffer overflows and memory exhaustion
DATE    : 2003-01-05 12:01 UTC
EXPLOIT : remote

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Post by Ilia Alshanetsky <ilia@prohost.org>:

"limbcrypt versions prior to 2.5.5 contain a number of buffer 
overflow vulnerabilities that stem from imporper or lacking input 
validation. By  passing a longer then expected input to a number of 
functions (multiple functions are affected) the user can successful 
make libmcrypt crash. 
 
Another vulnerability is due to the way libmcrypt loads algorithms via  
libtool. When the algorithms are loaded dynamically the each time the  
algorithm is loaded a small (few kilobytes) of memory are leaked. In a  
persistant enviroment (web server) this could lead to a memory 
exhaustion attack that will exhaust all avaliable memory by launching 
repeated requests at an application utilizing the mcrypt library. 
 
The solution to both of these problem is to upgrade to the latest 
release of libmcrypt, 2.5.5."

SOLUTION

It is recommended that all Gentoo Linux users who are running
dev-libs/libmcrypt-2.5.1-r4 or earlier update their systems as 
follows:

emerge rsync
emerge libmcrypt
emerge clean

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aliz@gentoo.org - GnuPG key is available at www.gentoo.org/~aliz
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