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gethostbyname() allows some set of horrible things, up to arbitrary remote execution
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Description

CVE-2015-0235: heap overflow in gethostbyname()
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953545

Details are a little spotty at the moment, but this appears to be very severe.

However, it looks like we can't do too much about this specifically until updates are available. This call is ubiquitous and there's no reasonable way to make sure no service on a box invokes it other than shutting everything down, and then we couldn't get back into the box later to patch it. Although I rebuilt OpenSSL ahead of patches, I'm less confident I can safely replace libc faster than proper packages become available.

I'll keep an eye on it, but the likely course of action is to to update once a fix is generally available.

Event Timeline

epriestley raised the priority of this task from to Normal.
epriestley updated the task description. (Show Details)
epriestley added a project: Security.
epriestley added subscribers: epriestley, btrahan, chad.
epriestley claimed this task.

This host is patched now.