Pound: Buffer overflow vulnerability

Background

Pound is a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end.

Description

Steven Van Acker has discovered a buffer overflow vulnerability in the “add_port()” function in Pound.

Impact

A remote attacker could send a request for an overly long hostname parameter, which could lead to the remote execution of arbitrary code with the rights of the Pound daemon process (by default, Gentoo uses the “nobody” user to run the Pound daemon).

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Pound users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=www-servers/pound-1.8.3"