Security Advisory 0810

Summary           : Buffer overflows in VLC RealText and CUE demuxers
Date              : November 2008
Affected versions : VLC media player 0.9.5 down to 0.5.0
ID                : VideoLAN-SA-0810
CVE reference     : CVE-2008-5032, CVE-2008-5036

Details

When parsing the header of an invalid CUE image file or an invalid RealText subtitle file, stack-based buffer overflows might occur.

Impact

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

Threat mitigation

Exploitation of this issue 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 remote sites (or disable the VLC browser plugins), until the patch is applied.

Alternatively, the VCD and Subtitles plugins (libvcd_plugin.* and libsubtitle_plugin.*) can be removed manually from the VLC plugin installation directory. However, this will prevent use of subtitle files and Video CD altogether.

Solution

VLC media player 0.9.6 addresses this issue. Patches for older versions are available from the official VLC source code repository 0.9-bugfix branch.

Credits

These vulnerabilities were reported by Tobias Klein.

References

The VideoLAN project: http://www.videolan.org/
VLC official GIT repository: http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git
Tobias Klein: http://www.trapkit.de/advisories/

History

3 November 2008: Vendor notification.
4 November 2008: Internal patches for VLC development version and 0.9-bugfix tree.
5 November 2008: Initial security advisory.; VLC media player 0.9.6 released.

Rémi Denis-Courmont,
on behalf of the VideoLAN project