Buffer overflow in Rsyslog

CVE-2019-17041

An issue was discovered in Rsyslog v8.1908.0. contrib/pmaixforwardedfrom/pmaixforwardedfrom.c has a heap overflow in the parser for AIX log messages. The parser tries to locate a log message delimiter (in this case, a space or a colon) but fails to account for strings that do not satisfy this constraint. If the string does not match, then the variable lenMsg will reach the value zero and will skip the sanity check that detects invalid log messages. The message will then be considered valid, and the parser will eat up the nonexistent colon delimiter. In doing so, it will decrement lenMsg, a signed integer, whose value was zero and now becomes minus one. The following step in the parser is to shift left the contents of the message. To do this, it will call memmove with the right pointers to the target and destination strings, but the lenMsg will now be interpreted as a huge value, causing a heap overflow.

Vulnerability class: Buffer Overflow

EPSS: 0.046 (90.6th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 9.8 (Critical). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

  • cve@mitre.org (x_refsource_CONFIRM, Third Party Advisory, Release Notes)
  • cve@mitre.org (x_refsource_CONFIRM, Patch, Third Party Advisory)
  • cve@mitre.org (vendor-advisory, Mailing List, Third Party Advisory, x_refsource_SUSE)
  • cve@mitre.org (vendor-advisory, Mailing List, Third Party Advisory, x_refsource_SUSE)
  • cve@mitre.org (x_refsource_FEDORA, vendor-advisory)
  • cve@mitre.org (x_refsource_FEDORA, vendor-advisory)
  • cve@mitre.org (mailing-list, x_refsource_MLIST, Mailing List, Third Party Advisory)

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2019-17041?
CVE-2019-17041 is a critical-severity vulnerability in Rsyslog, classified under Out-of-bounds Write. CVSS score: 9.8/10. Published 2019-10-07.
How severe is CVE-2019-17041?
Critical severity. CVSS v3 base score is 9.8 out of 10.
Is CVE-2019-17041 known to be exploited?
5 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.