VideoLAN, a project and a non-profit organization.

Security Advisory 1007

Summary           : Buffer overflow in Real demuxer
Date              : December 2010
Affected versions : VLC media player 1.1.5 and earlier
ID                : VideoLAN-SA-1007
CVE reference     : CVE-2010-3907

Details

When parsing the header of an invalid Real Media file an integer overflow might occur then trigger a heap-based buffer overflow.

Impact

If successful, it is unknown whether a malicious third party might be able to trigger execution of arbitrary code. Successful exploitation of this bug can crash the process of the 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 Real demuxer plugin (libreal_plugin.*) can be removed manually from the VLC plugin installation directory.

Solution

VLC media player 1.1.6 addresses this issue. Patches for older versions are available from the official VLC source code repositories.

Credits

This vulnerability was reported by Dan Rosenberg from VSR.

References

The VideoLAN project
http://www.videolan.org/
VLC official GIT repository
http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=commitdiff;h=6568965770f906d34d4aef83237842a5376adb55;hp=403718957b551c3c27546b7f82b2ae9ba937652f
Dan Rosenberg, VSR
http://www.vsecurity.com/

History

14 December 2010
Vendor notified
CVE ID reserved
15 December 2010
Internal patches for VLC development and 1.1.x versions
29 December 2010
Security advisory published
23 January 2011
VLC media player 1.1.6 released
Rémi Denis-Courmont,
on behalf of the VideoLAN project