Libncurses is a CRT screen handling C library. Libncurses and derived or closely related libraries contain buffer overflow vulnerabilities that may allow attackers to exploit setuid/setgid programs linked to them and elevate their privileges. When libncurses is loaded, it looks for termcap entries in the ~/.terminfo file, if it exists. During interpretation of this file, string copies are made of data from within the file to local buffers on the process' stack. Some of the copy operations are unsafe -- they do not ensure that the amount of bytes copied does not exceed the predefined buffer size. If an attacker were to create a .terminfo file containing oversized fields, the extra data will overwrite bytes on the stack beyond the boundaries of the destination buffer when copied. This is a classic buffer overflow condition. An attacker may exploit this vulnerability in programs that are linked to libncurses and gain their effective privileges. It should be noted that being linked to...
Libncurses is a CRT screen handling C library. Libncurses and derived or closely related libraries contain buffer overflow vulnerabilities that may allow attackers to exploit setuid/setgid programs linked to them and elevate their privileges. When libncurses is loaded, it looks for termcap entries in the ~/.terminfo file, if it exists. During interpretation of this file, string copies are made of data from within the file to local buffers on the process' stack. Some of the copy operations are unsafe -- they do not ensure that the amount of bytes copied does not exceed the predefined buffer size. If an attacker were to create a .terminfo file containing oversized fields, the extra data will overwrite bytes on the stack beyond the boundaries of the destination buffer when copied. This is a classic buffer overflow condition. An attacker may exploit this vulnerability in programs that are linked to libncurses and gain their effective privileges. It should be noted that being linked to ncurses doesn't immediately make a program vulnerable to this bug. The vulnerable program must use the offending functions in some way in order to be exploitable.
