USN-2906-1: GNU cpio vulnerabilities

22 February 2016

Several security issues were fixed in GNU cpio.

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Releases

Packages

  • cpio - a tool to manage archives of files

Details

Alexander Cherepanov discovered that GNU cpio incorrectly handled symbolic
links when used with the --no-absolute-filenames option. If a user or
automated system were tricked into extracting a specially-crafted cpio
archive, a remote attacker could possibly use this issue to write arbitrary
files. This issue only affected Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
(CVE-2015-1197)

Gustavo Grieco discovered that GNU cpio incorrectly handled memory when
extracting archive files. If a user or automated system were tricked into
extracting a specially-crafted cpio archive, a remote attacker could use
this issue to cause GNU cpio to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or
possibly execute arbitrary code. (CVE-2016-2037)

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Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

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Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 15.10
Ubuntu 14.04
Ubuntu 12.04

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.