Dropbear: Privilege escalation

Background

Dropbear is an SSH server and client with a small memory footprint.

Description

Under certain conditions Dropbear could fail to allocate a sufficient amount of memory, possibly resulting in a buffer overflow.

Impact

By sending specially crafted data to the server, authenticated users could exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the SSH server user, which is the root user by default.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Dropbear users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=net-misc/dropbear-0.47"