[Bug 1881982] Re: DoS vulnerability: cause resource exhaustion

[Marc Deslauriers]

** Also affects: whoopsie (Ubuntu Bionic)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Also affects: whoopsie (Ubuntu Groovy)
   Importance: Medium
     Assignee: Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)
       Status: Confirmed

** Also affects: whoopsie (Ubuntu Xenial)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Also affects: whoopsie (Ubuntu Focal)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Also affects: whoopsie (Ubuntu Eoan)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Changed in: whoopsie (Ubuntu Xenial)
       Status: New => Confirmed

** Changed in: whoopsie (Ubuntu Bionic)
       Status: New => Confirmed

** Changed in: whoopsie (Ubuntu Eoan)
       Status: New => Confirmed

** Changed in: whoopsie (Ubuntu Focal)
       Status: New => Confirmed

** Changed in: whoopsie (Ubuntu Xenial)
   Importance: Undecided => Medium

** Changed in: whoopsie (Ubuntu Bionic)
   Importance: Undecided => Medium

** Changed in: whoopsie (Ubuntu Eoan)
   Importance: Undecided => Medium

** Changed in: whoopsie (Ubuntu Focal)
   Importance: Undecided => Medium

** Changed in: whoopsie (Ubuntu Xenial)
     Assignee: (unassigned) => Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)

** Changed in: whoopsie (Ubuntu Bionic)
     Assignee: (unassigned) => Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)

** Changed in: whoopsie (Ubuntu Eoan)
     Assignee: (unassigned) => Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)

** Changed in: whoopsie (Ubuntu Focal)
     Assignee: (unassigned) => Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1881982

Title:
  DoS vulnerability: cause resource exhaustion

Status in whoopsie package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in whoopsie source package in Xenial:
  Confirmed
Status in whoopsie source package in Bionic:
  Confirmed
Status in whoopsie source package in Eoan:
  Confirmed
Status in whoopsie source package in Focal:
  Confirmed
Status in whoopsie source package in Groovy:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Hi,

  I have found a security issue on whoopsie 0.2.69 and earlier.

  # Vulnerability description
  The parse_report() function in whoopsie.c allows attackers to cause a denial of service (memory leak) via a crafted file. 
  Exploitation of this issue causes excessive memory consumption which results in the Linux kernel triggering OOM killer on arbitrary process.
  This results in the process being terminated by the OOM killer.

  
  # Details 
  We have found a memory leak vulnerability during the parsing the crash file, when a collision occurs on GHashTable through g_hash_table_insert().
  According to [1], if the key already exists in the GHashTable, its current value is replaced with the new value.
  If 'key_destory_func' and 'value_destroy_func' are supplied when creating the table, the old value and the passed key are freed using that function.
  Unfortunately, whoopsie does not handle the old value and the passed key when collision happens.
  If a crash file contains same repetitive key-value pairs, it leads to memory leak as much as the amount of repetition and results in denial-of-service.

  [1] https://developer.gnome.org/glib/stable/glib-Hash-Tables.html#g
  -hash-table-insert

  
  # PoC (*Please check the below PoC: whoopsie_killer.py)
  1) Generates a certain malformed crash file that contains same repetitive key-value pairs.
  2) Trigger the whoopsie to read the generated crash file.
  3) After then, the whoopsie process has been killed.

  
  # Mitigation (*Please check the below patch: g_hash_table_memory_leak.patch)
  We should use g_hash_table_new_full() with ‘key_destroy_func’ and ‘value_destroy_func’ functions instead of g_hash_table_new().
  Otherwise, before g_hash_table_insert(), we should check the collision via g_hash_table_lookup_extended() and obtain pointer to the old value and remove it.

  Sincerely,

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