USN-2906-1: GNU cpio vulnerabilities

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-2906-1

22nd February, 2016

cpio vulnerabilities

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

• Ubuntu 15.10
• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Summary

Several security issues were fixed in GNU cpio.

Software description

• cpio - a tool to manage archives of files

Details

Alexander Cherepanov discovered that GNU cpio incorrectly handled symbolic
links when used with the --no-absolute-filenames option. If a user or
automated system were tricked into extracting a specially-crafted cpio
archive, a remote attacker could possibly use this issue to write arbitrary
files. This issue only affected Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
(CVE-2015-1197)

Gustavo Grieco discovered that GNU cpio incorrectly handled memory when
extracting archive files. If a user or automated system were tricked into
extracting a specially-crafted cpio archive, a remote attacker could use
this issue to cause GNU cpio to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or
possibly execute arbitrary code. (CVE-2016-2037)

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package version:

Ubuntu 15.10:

cpio 2.11+dfsg-4.1ubuntu1.1

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS:

cpio 2.11+dfsg-1ubuntu1.2

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS:

cpio 2.11-7ubuntu3.2

To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

CVE-2015-1197, CVE-2016-2037