I reported several bugs discovered with afl in p7zip, the portable command line version of the 7-Zip archiving tool, one null pointer access causing a segfault and one out of bounds heap read.
At the time I reported the first issues these were already fixed in the main 7-Zip code, but the portable version hadn't been updated yet. Now there is version 16.02, unfortunately there are still issues left.
Null pointer access / segfault
An access to a null pointer in NArchive::N7z::CStreamSwitch::Set can cause p7zip to crash.
Null pointer acctess / segfault (unfixed in 16.02)
A memory allocation isn't checked for a failing allocation. If the file's header indicates a large data size the allocation will fail and subsequently p7zip will try to write to a null pointer. This will likely only lead to a crash and not to further security issues, however this problem seems prevalent in the 7-zip codebase - there are several memory allocations without a check for failures.
p7zip is often used in security appliances to scan inputs, because it supports a large number of archiving file formats. Vulnerabilities in it have played a role in previous attacks on Fireeye appliances. Therefore it's worrying that it's so easy to find crashers in it via fuzzing.
I recently wrote about a large number of bugs and potential security issues in libarchive. The release 3.2.0 missed one fix for an out of bounds read in the rar parser. Also I discovered one additional signed integer overflow issue with ubsan. Both issues are now fixed in libarchive 3.2.1.
All issues were discovered with the help of american fuzzy lop.
With the release of version 3.2.1 I consider libarchive to be reasonably robust against fuzzing. I've tested all supported file formats and fuzzed each one with afl/asan for at least one day. Of course that doesn't mean that no security issues are left - but the easy to find ones should be wiped out.
libarchive version 3.2.0 (released on April 30th) fixed a large number of memory access bugs that I reported to them a while ago. All issues (except the test suite failure) were found with the help of american fuzzy lop and either address sanitizer or undefined behavior sanitizer.
Unfortunately one out of bounds heap read bug in the RAR parser (CVE-2015-8934, sample file) remained unfixed. I hope a fix will find its way into the next version. I was interested in making libarchive more robust because once all issues are fixed it can serve as a safer alternative to many low quality command line tools for various archiving formats.
Further fuzzing of ImageMagick uncovered some more issues.
An out of bounds memory read in the VerticalFilter() function can be triggered by a malformed DDS file. Sample file Git commit / fix CVE-2016-5687
This was fixed in versions 7.0.1-4 and 6.9.4-3.
Recently the ImageTragick vulnerability shed some light on the security status of ImageMagick.
This made me wonder how resilient to fuzzing ImageMagick is these days. It's pretty much a posterchild example for a good fuzzing target: Lots of supported complex binary file formats.
I already did some fuzzing on ImageMagick, but as far as I remember that was before I used american fuzzy lop and was done with zzuf. I was also aware that others did some more thorough fuzzing on ImageMagick.
What I did now was relatively simple: I took a trivial, few pixels PNG and used ImageMagick's "convert" tool to convert it into all file formats that have both read and write support in ImageMagick. I used that to run a fuzzing job with afl and asan. By design ImageMagick will sometimes do huge memory allocations, these can be prevented by setting limits for the width, height and memory usage in the policy.xml file.
I discovered one heap buffer overflow in the PICT parser and one heap out of bounds read in the PSD parser. Given how big the attack surface is this is not terrible, but it shows that despite previous efforts there's still potential to fuzz ImageMagick.
Both issues have been fixed in the versions 6.9.4-0 and 7.0.1-2. In the meantime new versions (6.9.4-1, 7.0.1-3) came out that, as far as I understand the ChangeLog, remove another potential vector for the ImageTragick vulnerabilities, so you should preferrably update to those.
I lately fuzzed various filesystem check tools. This uncovered a number of issues in dosfstools / fsck.fat that have now been fixed in the new version 4.0. All issues were found with american fuzzy lop and address sanitizer.
These bugs can pose a security risk if a system automatically checks attached storage media with fsck or in situations where filesystems on untrusted devices get checked. The new version dosfstools 4.0 fixes all four bugs.
PHP recently released the security updates 7.0.6, 5.6.21 and 5.5.35 that fix - among a couple of other security issues - a couple of out of bounds issues in the EXIF parser I reported.
These bugs are not exceptionally interesting, but there is something to know when fuzzing PHP and the same applies also to a number of other applications: It uses a custom memory allocator that can sometimes mask issues from memory safety tools like Address Sanitizer. It is therefore good to know about them and disable them during fuzz testing.
With PHP this can be circumvented by setting the environment variable USE_ZEND_ALLOC=0 while fuzzing. This disables the Zend allocator from PHP and uses normal libc memory allocation calls.
Today OpenSSL released a security advisory. To my surprise one of the high severity issues involved a bug I had reported about a year ago.
The OpenSSL team didn't consider it to be a security issue - and neither did I. What I did back then was to find all possible inputs of the openssl command line tool and test them with american fuzzy lop, including those that very likely wouldn't have any security impact.
The feature I tested while finding this bug is part of the asn1 parser. It's actually not very well documented, but with openssl asn1parse -genconf [input] you can give OpenSSL a text file in a specific format that will then generate an ASN.1 structure. However it seems highly implausible that in any context one would use such a feature with attacker controlled input - therefore the bugs were fixed, but considered to be not security relevant.
But actually, the bug was not in the parser for that format itself. It was in an ASN.1 encoding function. Therefore applications that take ASN.1 encoded data and reencode it may trigger this code.
The bottom line is probably that we should be careful in claims that certain issues are not security relevant. The good news is that OpenSSL fixed this issue anyway, so all versions since June 2015 are safe.
Lately a couple of updates have fixed issues that I discovered while testing software with Address Sanitizer (ASAN). I'll publish these combined. Once again these show that a lot of software hasn't been tested with ASAN and what kind of bugs it can uncover.
In syslog-ng a function returns an error -1 that gets stored in an unsigned variable. This cannot be stored and a subsequent check for the error value fails, this later leads to a heap out of bounds memory read. This was fixed in syslog-ng 3.7.3. Upstream bug report Pull request / patch syslog-ng 3.7.3 release notes
In the monit system monitoring tool a heap overflow was discovered. A call to sscanf would write a string of length 256 into a 256 byte long buffer. However this fails to consider the trailing zero byte of that string, therefore causing a one byte heap overflow. This was fixed in monit 5.16. Commit / fix
In the compilation tool cmake a use after free error was found. This happened becaused a variable was used in a comparison and was free'd during that comparison operation. This was fixed in cmake 3.5.0. Upstream bug report Commit / fix
The latest releases of ProFTPD 1.3.5a and 1.3.6rc2 fix several out of bounds read issues. I discovered these issues by running the test suite with Address Sanitizer enabled.
An invalid off by one read can happen in the function pr_fs_dircat(). This affects both 1.3.5a and 1.3.6rc1 and earlier. Upstream bug report Git commit / fix
An invalid off by one read can happen in the string handling function pr_ascii_ftp_to_crlf(). This code is not present in the stable 1.3.5 release series and only affects 1.3.6 release candidates before rc2. Upstream bug report Git commit / fix
A missing null termination of a string causes an out of bounds memory read in a test. This does not affect the ProFTPD code itself, it's just an issue in the test suite. Upstream bug report Git commit / fix
Independent of these memory access issues I discovered an issue in ProFTPD regarding Diffie Hellman parameters. The server will choose risky 1024 bit parameters and ignore a user-supplied parameter file.
The pidgin-otr plugin version 4.0.2 fixes a heap use after free error. The bug is triggered when a user tries to authenticate a buddy and happens in the function create_smp_dialog.
The bug was discovered with Address Sanitizer. This is yet another example why all C/C++ code should be tested with Address Sanitizer enabled.
This bug was already independently discovered and reported by Stefan Sperling in the otr bug tracker.
The Nettle library is a library for basic cryptographic functions. Its most prominent user is GnuTLS.
Through fuzzing of elliptic curve scalar multiplications (multiplying a point on an elliptic curve with a scalar number) I discovered two carry propagation bugs that would lead the cauculations to produce wrong results. They affect the NIST P-256 and P-384 curves. The P-256 bug is in the C code and affects multiple architectures. The P-384 bug is in the assembly code and only affects 64 bit x86. Both bugs were found with the help of american fuzzy lop.
While analyzing these bugs Nettle developer Niels Möller discovered another carry propagation bug in P-256 that was fixed in the same commit (CVE-2015-8805). Nettle 3.2 fixes all three bugs.
The impact is currently unclear, but miscalculations in cryptographic functions should generally be considered security issues. I'd like to encourage cryptographers to try to analyze whether these bugs can lead to cryptographic breaks.
I have published a code example on how to fuzz elliptic curve multiplications. It can compare the output of OpenSSL with either Nettle or NSS. It currently works only with prime field curves, but it can probably be adapted to other curves.
A bug in the NSS library can cause certain cryptographic calculations to produce wrong results. The bug is in the function mp_div(), this function gets used by the function mp_exptmod(), a combination of an exponentiation and a modulo operation. The mp_exptmod() function is used in several cryptographic algorithms, most notably it's the function to sign and encrypt with RSA and to calculate Diffie Hellman key exchanges. The NSS library is used for TLS connections in various Mozilla products.
This bug was found by comparing the results of NSS and OpenSSL bignum calculations and fuzzing the input with american fuzzy lop. A similar bug was also found and fixed in OpenSSL recently.
I first reported both issues separately, not knowing that they were caused by the same bug. In a first analysis both the Mozilla developers and I thought that the impact of the mp_div() bug would be minor, because it wasn't used in the cryptography code of NSS. But we overlooked that it was indirectly used through the mp_exptmod() function.
It is unclear what the exact impact and severity of this bug is. I am not aware of a practical way to exploit it, but as it affects important crypto code it might be possible to find exploitable scenarios.
I have published code examples with test inputs triggering the bug for both functions on Github. This bug is fixed in NSS 3.21 and in Firefox 44.
libbsd is a library to provide common functions from BSD systems on Linux.
libbsd 0.8.1 and earlier contains a buffer overflow in the function fgetwln(). An if checks if it is necessary to reallocate memory in the target buffer. However this check is off by one, therefore an out of bounds write happens.
Upstream has released version 0.8.2 to fix this.
I have checked where this function gets used. I didn't find any code using it, so I assume the impact is limited.
This bug was found with the help of Address Sanitizer.
Just quick: In the past months I've worked on making it possible to compile Gentoo Linux with Address Sanitizer. I have posted the announcement to my personal blog.
