gdb: Multiple vulnerabilities

Background

gdb is the GNU project’s debugger, facilitating the analysis and debugging of applications. The BFD library provides a uniform method of accessing a variety of object file formats.

Description

Tavis Ormandy of the Gentoo Linux Security Audit Team discovered an integer overflow in the BFD library, resulting in a heap overflow. A review also showed that by default, gdb insecurely sources initialisation files from the working directory.

Impact

Successful exploitation would result in the execution of arbitrary code on loading a specially crafted object file or the execution of arbitrary commands.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All gdb users should upgrade to the latest stable version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=sys-devel/gdb-6.3-r3"