CVE-2014-0591: FAQ and Supplemental Information
  • 03 Dec 2018
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CVE-2014-0591: FAQ and Supplemental Information

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Article Summary

This page provides supplemental information for the CVE-2014-0591 Security Advisory (CVE-2014-0591: A Crafted Query Against an NSEC3-signed Zone Can Crash BIND).

What causes this vulnerability?

One of our developers writes:

"The bug (which causes an INSIST crash in name.c) is caused by a misuse of the standard memcpy() function which is, by happenstance, safe on most platforms; in this case a memory buffer was being copied to an overlapping buffer. The bug went undetected until recently because most implementations of memcpy() do handle this situation safely, but the standard does not require them to do so. Recent optimizations to glibc have removed the safety net, exposing a long-existing but previously harmless coding error in named."

BIND is crashing on my system. How can I tell if this bug is the cause?

Nameservers crashing because of this bug will crash with an INSIST failure while checking a structure for consistency in name.c, usually between lines 1700 and 1800. The crash log message will look like this, although the exact line and message may vary depending on how the memcpy misuse has corrupted the structure.

name.c:1724: INSIST(count <= 63) failed

What systems are affected?

ISC is unable to characterize all of the systems affected, but to date, every reporter who has encountered this bug has been running on a system using glibc 2.18. If you are running an operating system that does not use glibc for its system C library, or if you are running a version prior to 2.18, you may not be vulnerable, though you can guarantee that you are not vulnerable by installing a version which patches the underlying memcpy() misuse. Whether or not the crash can occur depends on the behavior of your C library's memcpy() call.

Addendum, December 2014: Red Hat Product Security advised us that they believe this problem might go back as far as glibc 2.11.