MadWifi: Kernel driver buffer overflow

Background

MadWifi (Multiband Atheros Driver for Wireless Fidelity) provides a Linux kernel device driver for Atheros-based Wireless LAN devices.

Description

Laurent Butti, Jerome Raznieski and Julien Tinnes reported a buffer overflow in the encode_ie() and the giwscan_cb() functions from ieee80211_wireless.c.

Impact

A remote attacker could send specially crafted wireless WPA packets containing malicious RSN Information Headers (IE) that could potentially lead to the remote execution of arbitrary code as the root user.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All MadWifi users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=net-wireless/madwifi-ng-0.9.2.1"