Vigil@nce - GNOME vte: denial of service via insert-blank-characters
July 2011 by Vigil@nce
This bulletin was written by Vigil@nce : http://vigilance.fr/offer
SYNTHESIS OF THE VULNERABILITY
An attacker can invite the victim to display a text document with
gnome-terminal (GNOME vte), in order to create a denial of service.
Severity: 1/4
Creation date: 13/07/2011
IMPACTED PRODUCTS
– Unix - plateform
DESCRIPTION OF THE VULNERABILITY
The gnome-terminal terminal uses the GNOME vte (Virtual Terminal
Emulation) library (widget).
A terminal support ANSI sequences, which are used to alter the
display:
– ^[ line; column H : move to the (line,column) screen coordinates
– ^[ num A : go up of num lines
– ^[ num @ : insert num spaces ("insert-blank-characters")
– etc.
However, vte does not limit the number of spaces which can be
inserted with "insert-blank-characters". The terminal thus
consumes a lot a resources to display the spaces.
An attacker can therefore invite the victim to display a text
document with gnome-terminal (GNOME vte), in order to create a
denial of service.
ACCESS TO THE COMPLETE VIGIL@NCE BULLETIN
http://vigilance.fr/vulnerability/GNOME-vte-denial-of-service-via-insert-blank-characters-10840