5 - RHSA-2012:0305

Problem Description:

Updated boost packages that fix two security issues and two bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having low security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.

2. Relevant releases/architectures:

RHEL Desktop Workstation (v. 5 client) - i386, x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (v. 5 server) - i386, ia64, ppc, s390x, x86_64 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 5 client) - i386, x86_64

3. Description:

The boost packages provide free, peer-reviewed, portable C++ source libraries with emphasis on libraries which work well with the C++ Standard Library.

Invalid pointer dereference flaws were found in the way the Boost regular expression library processed certain, invalid expressions. An attacker able to make an application using the Boost library process a specially-crafted regular expression could cause that application to crash or, potentially, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the application. (CVE-2008-0171)

NULL pointer dereference flaws were found in the way the Boost regular expression library processed certain, invalid expressions. An attacker able to make an application using the Boost library process a specially-crafted regular expression could cause that application to crash. (CVE-2008-0172)

Red Hat would like to thank Will Drewry for reporting these issues.

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* Prior to this update, the construction of a regular expression object could fail when several regular expression objects were created simultaneously, such as in a multi-threaded program. With this update, the object variables have been moved from the shared memory to the stack. Now, the constructing function is thread safe. (BZ#472384)

* Prior to this update, header files in several Boost libraries contained preprocessor directives that the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 4.4 could not handle. This update instead uses equivalent constructs that are standard C. (BZ#567722)

All users of boost are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these issues.

4. Solution:

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-11259

5. Bugs fixed (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/):

428316 - CVE-2008-0171 boost regular expression memory corruption flaws 428320 - CVE-2008-0172 boost regular expression NULL dereference flaw 472384 - Thread-safety bug in Boost.Regex-1.33.x 567722 - g++4.4 incompatible with numeric/ublas/matrix_sparse.hpp