Synopsis:    Moderate: glibc security and bug fix update
Issue Date:  2012-07-18
CVE Numbers: CVE-2012-3406


The glibc packages provide the standard C and standard math libraries used
by multiple programs on the system. Without these libraries, the Linux
system cannot function properly.

It was discovered that the formatted printing functionality in glibc did
not properly restrict the use of alloca(). This could allow an attacker to
bypass FORTIFY_SOURCE protections and execute arbitrary code using a format
string flaw in an application, even though these protections are expected
to limit the impact of such flaws to an application abort. (CVE-2012-3406)

This update also fixes the following bug:

* If a file or a string was in the IBM-930 encoding, and contained the
invalid multibyte character "0xffff", attempting to use iconv() (or the
iconv command) to convert that file or string to another encoding, such as
UTF-8, resulted in a segmentation fault. With this update, the conversion
code for the IBM-930 encoding recognizes this invalid character and calls
an error handler, rather than causing a segmentation fault.

All users of glibc are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
contain backported patches to fix these issues.

SL5:
  i386
     glibc-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i386.rpm
     glibc-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i686.rpm
     glibc-common-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i386.rpm
     glibc-debuginfo-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i386.rpm
     glibc-debuginfo-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i686.rpm
     glibc-debuginfo-common-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i386.rpm
     glibc-devel-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i386.rpm
     glibc-headers-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i386.rpm
     glibc-utils-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i386.rpm
     nscd-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i386.rpm
  x86_64
     glibc-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i686.rpm
     glibc-2.5-81.el5_8.4.x86_64.rpm
     glibc-common-2.5-81.el5_8.4.x86_64.rpm
     glibc-debuginfo-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i386.rpm
     glibc-debuginfo-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i686.rpm
     glibc-debuginfo-2.5-81.el5_8.4.x86_64.rpm
     glibc-debuginfo-common-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i386.rpm
     glibc-devel-2.5-81.el5_8.4.i386.rpm
     glibc-devel-2.5-81.el5_8.4.x86_64.rpm
     glibc-headers-2.5-81.el5_8.4.x86_64.rpm
     glibc-utils-2.5-81.el5_8.4.x86_64.rpm
     nscd-2.5-81.el5_8.4.x86_64.rpm

- Scientific Linux Development Team