InfoSect's Month of Pointless Bugs (#11)

Dr Silvio Cesare

InfoSect, Canberra's hackerspace, regularly runs public group sessions to perform code review and vulnerability discovery. Over the next 30 days, I'll highlight the source code of 30 unknown vulnerabilities.

Bug #11

 In the lbreakout2 game, the server send a zero length string ("\0") representing the channel name during a MSG_SET_CHANNEL request, the client leads to an out of bounds read. Not a useful out of bounds read, but an out of bounds read nevertheless.

 client/client_recv.c

                         case MSG_SET_CHANNEL:
                                {
                                /* we only need to update the name */
                                char *s = msg_read_string();
                                gui_label_set_text( label_channel, s);
                                handled = 1;
                                }
                                break;
                        /* challenge */

gui/gui_label.c
void gui_label_set_text( GuiWidget *widget, char *format, ... )
{

...

        text = text_create( widget->spec.label.text,
            (widget->screen_region.w - 2 * widget->border) / 
            widget->spec.label.font->width );


static LabelText* text_create( char *orig_str, int char_width )
{
    int i, j;
    char line[256]; /* a line should not exceed this length */
    int pos;
    int last_space;
    int new_line;
    LabelText *text = 0;
    char *str = 0;

     text = calloc ( 1, sizeof( LabelText ) );
    /* maybe orig_str is a constant expression; duplicate for safety */
    str = strdup( orig_str );

...

    if ( char_width > 0 ) {
        for ( i = 0; i < strlen( str ); i++ )
            if ( str[i] == 10 )
                text->count++;
        /* maybe one unfinished line */
        if ( str[strlen( str ) - 1] != 10 )

The above indexes str[-1] which is our out of bounds read.

            text->count++;
    }



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