Vigil@nce: VLC, memory corruption via XSPF
October 2008 by Vigil@nce
SYNTHESIS
An attacker can create a malicious XSPF playlist and invite the
victim to open it with VLC in order to execute code on his
computer.
Gravity: 2/4
Consequences: user access/rights
Provenance: document
Means of attack: 1 proof of concept
Ability of attacker: specialist (3/4)
Confidence: confirmed by the editor (5/5)
Diffusion of the vulnerable configuration: high (3/3)
Creation date: 15/10/2008
IMPACTED PRODUCTS
– Unix - plateform
DESCRIPTION
The VideoLAN VLC program displays multimedia documents.
The XSPF (XML Format for Sharing Playlist) format associates a
numeric identifier to each multimedia document. For example:
...
However, VLC directly uses this identifier as an array index. An
attacker can thus for example use a negative identifier to corrupt
the memory.
An attacker can therefore create a malicious XSPF playlist and
invite the victim to open it with VLC in order to execute code on
his computer.
CHARACTERISTICS
Identifiers: BID-31758, CORE-2008-1010, CVE-2008-4558, VIGILANCE-VUL-8177