PCRE: Buffer overflow

Background

PCRE is a Perl-compatible regular expression library. GLib includes a copy of PCRE.

Description

PCRE contains a buffer overflow vulnerability when processing a character class containing a very large number of characters with codepoints greater than 255.

Impact

A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted regular expression to an application making use of the PCRE library, which could possibly lead to the execution of arbitrary code or a Denial of Service.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All PCRE users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=dev-libs/libpcre-7.6-r1"

All GLib users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=dev-libs/glib-2.14.6"