Security Advisory 0802

Summary           : Arbitrary memory overwrite in the MP4 demuxer
Date              : 27 February 2008
Affected versions : VLC media player 0.8.6d and earlier
ID                : VideoLAN-SA-0802, CORE-2008-0130
CVE reference     : CVE-2008-0984

Details

VLC media player's MPEG-4 file format parser (a.k.a. the MP4 demuxer) suffers from an arbitrary memory overwrite vulnerability when using specially crafted (invalid) MP4 input files.

Impact

If successful, a malicious third party could trigger execution of arbitrary code within the context of the VLC media player, or otherwise crash the player instance.

Threat mitigation

Exploitation of the MP4 demuxer problem requires the user to explicitly open a specially crafted file.

Workarounds

The user should refrain from opening files from untrusted third parties or accessing untrusted Web sites (or disable the VLC browser plugins), until the patch is applied.

Solution

VLC media player 0.8.6e addresses these issues and introduces further usability fixes. The source code patch can be downloaded separately here: vlc-0.8.6-CORE-2008-0130.patch.

Pre-compiled packages will be available at the usual download locations shortly.

Credits

Felipe Manzano and Anibal Sacco from Core Security Technologies are credited with the discovery of this security issue.

References

Core Security Technologies: http://www.coresecurity.com/
The VideoLAN Project: http://www.videolan.org/

History

27 February 2008: VLC 0.8.6e bugfix release; Public disclosure
7 February 2008: Source code fixes for VLC 0.8.6d and development tree; Vendor obtained vulnerability description
6 February 2008: Vendor notified of security problem

Rémi Denis-Courmont,
on behalf of the VideoLAN project