 A vulnerability discovered in Icecast streaming media server could be leveraged by an attacker to kill the broadcast of online radio stations that rely on it to reach their audience. The flaw is sufficient to trigger a segmentation fault in the server process - an access violation condition that leads to a crash. A theoretical risk exists for remote code execution. An attacker could achieve this with sufficiently long, specially crafted HTTP headers. Maintained by the Xiph.org Foundation, Icecast supports both audio and video data. Because it is available under a free software license and has support for open standards for communication, Icecast is a popular choice for creating an online radio station. A patch is included in the latest version of the software, whose changelog describes the issue as a buffer overflow that affects Icecast versions 2.4.0, 2.4.1, 2.4.2 or 2.4.3 "if there is a “mount” definition that enables URL authentication. The security bug stems from choosing the 'snprintf' function that redirects the data output to a buffer, over 'sprintf' to avoid buffer overflow issues by truncating the output if the buffer is not sufficiently large. Making this choice is not necessarily a safer bet when a specific condition is met. Nick Rolfe of Semmle Security Research Team says that the 'snprintf' function does not offer protection against buffer overflows "if you provide a size argument that's larger than the actual size of the buffer. "Follow this on OUR FORUM.  I love when products are made in the USA. Don't get me wrong, I am not against things made in other countries. Hell, it is virtually impossible to live in America and not buy foreign goods. If you look at the tags on your clothes, you will almost never see "Made in the USA." But still, I take pride when a product is made here. For instance, so far in my life, I have only ever owned Ford vehicles. With that said, Ford is moving more and more of its labor to Mexico, but I digress. Computers made in America are virtually non-existent, but a little company in Denver had a dream to do just that. System76 has long been looking to make a Linux-powered computer in the USA using open source ideology. A lofty goal, which many folks didn't think would ever be achieved. Well, against all odds, today, System76 proves the haters wrong as it finally unveils its much-anticipated Thelio desktop computer. And boy, oh boy, it is beautiful. "Thelio Systems are designed to be easily expandable, making personalizing the computer a tantalizingly easy process. Slip in drives, add memory, and upgrade graphics cards at will. Additionally, the open hardware design that Thelio is built upon allows the user to easily learn how their computer works and make modifications using this information. Customization is simple to ensure that the computer encompasses people’s needs, as well as their personality," says System76. More details are posted on OUR FORUM.  A new side-channel vulnerability has been discovered called PortSmash that uses a timing attack that to steal information from other processes running in the same CPU core with SMT/hyper-threading enabled. Utilizing this attack, researchers were able to steal the private decryption key from an OpenSSL thread running in the same core as their exploit. SMT/Hyper-threading is when one physical CPU core is split into two virtual logical cores that can be used to run two separate process threads at once. This method can increase performance as the two threads will utilize idle CPU resources more efficiently to execute instructions faster. A side channel timing attack is when an attacker analyzes how fast a thread executes particular instructions and utilizes that information to work backward to discover what data was used as input. The PortSmash vulnerability was discovered by researchers Billy Bob Brumley, Cesar Pereida Garcia, Sohaib ul Hassan, and Nicola Tuveri from the Tampere University of Technology in Finland and Alejandro Cabrera Aldaya from the Universidad Tecnologica de la Habana CUJAE in Cuba. An advisory was made to the OSS-Sec mailing list and their research has been submitted as a paper titled "Port Contention for Fun and Profit" as an IACR eprint, which is currently awaiting moderation before it's released. Learn more on this security update by visiting OUR FORUM. |
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