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zlib is a C library for compression. Recently, reports of a vulnerability have surfaced that would allow execution of arbitrary code. This is important for Java because the JVM uses zlib internally to manage ZIP compression.
Description
Tavis Ormandy of the Gentoo Linux Security Audit Team discovered a buffer overflow in zlib. A bounds checking operation failed to take invalid data into account, allowing a specifically malformed deflate data stream to overrun a buffer.
Impact
An attacker could construct a malformed data stream, embedding it within network communication or an application file format, potentially resulting in the execution of arbitrary code when decoded by the application using the zlib library.
I wonder what kind of impact can there be... say, the server side - does any server ever have to unzip third-party, unknown-user files? I can't recollect such a scenario. Client side - it is Linux. Okay, some Linux hackers can deploy on their site a zip or a jar file that would crash the client system when downloaded. Is it a very big deal? I don't know.
Description
Tavis Ormandy of the Gentoo Linux Security Audit Team discovered a buffer overflow in zlib. A bounds checking operation failed to take invalid data into account, allowing a specifically malformed deflate data stream to overrun a buffer.
Impact
An attacker could construct a malformed data stream, embedding it within network communication or an application file format, potentially resulting in the execution of arbitrary code when decoded by the application using the zlib library.
I wonder what kind of impact can there be... say, the server side - does any server ever have to unzip third-party, unknown-user files? I can't recollect such a scenario. Client side - it is Linux. Okay, some Linux hackers can deploy on their site a zip or a jar file that would crash the client system when downloaded. Is it a very big deal? I don't know.
