VideoLAN, a project and a non-profit organization.

Security Bulletin VLC 3.0.8

Summary           : Multiple vulnerabilities fixed in VLC media player
Date              : August 2019
Affected versions : VLC media player 3.0.7.1 and earlier for most issues
ID                : VideoLAN-SB-VLC-308
CVE references    : CVE-2019-13602, CVE-2019-13962, CVE-2019-14437, CVE-2019-14438, CVE-2019-14498, CVE-2019-14533, CVE-2019-14534, CVE-2019-14535, CVE-2019-14776, CVE-2019-14777, CVE-2019-14778, CVE-2019-14970

Details

A remote user could create a specifically crafted file that could trigger issues ranging from buffer overflows to division by zero.

Impact

If successful, a malicious third party could trigger either a crash of VLC or an arbitratry code execution with the privileges of the target user.

While these issues in themselves are most likely to just crash the player, we can't exclude that they could be combined to leak user informations or remotely execute code. ASLR and DEP help reduce the likelyness of code execution, but may be bypassed.

We have not seen exploits performing code execution through these vulnerabilities


While CVE CVE-2019-13602 & CVE-2019-13962 mention a base score of 8.8 and 9.8 respectively, the VideoLAN team believes this severity is highly exagerated; in our opinion, a base score of 4.3 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L) would be more reasonable.

CVE-2019-13962 only affects VLC 3.0.2 to 3.0.7.1

Threat mitigation

Exploitation of those issues requires the user to explicitly open a specially crafted file or stream.

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.

Solution

VLC media player 3.0.8 addresses the issues.

Credits

CVE-2019-14437, CVE-2019-14438, CVE-2019-14498, CVE-2019-14533, CVE-2019-14534, CVE-2019-14535, CVE-2019-14776, CVE-2019-14777, CVE-2019-14778, CVE-2019-14970 were reported by Antonio Morales from the Semmle Security Team

Two issues with pending CVE IDs were reported by Scott Bell from Pulse Security

CVE-2019-13602 was reported by Hyeon-Ju Lee

CVE-2019-13962 was reported by Xinyu Liu

Special thanks

VideoLAN would like to thank Antonio Morales and Scott Bell for their time and cooperation with the VideoLAN security team

References

The VideoLAN project
http://www.videolan.org/
VLC official GIT repository
http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git