The Patching Friars' AlmanacA calendar of CVE saints

January 28

GHOSTHoly card for ghost, generated with AI (Claude, Anthropic) for the Lunario dei Frati Patchatori.CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 gethostbyname() GHOST SPIRITUS GLIBCI
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Saint GHOST, Phantom of glibc

Patron of deprecated functions still in use, absurdly long hostnames, and long-term-support distributions.

Life

On 28 January 2015 Qualys revealed a heap overflow in the gethostbyname function of glibc, the library almost all of Linux rests on: the name comes from GetHOSTbyname itself. It had already been fixed in 2013, but nobody recognized it as a security flaw, so many stable distributions kept carrying it around, like a ghost.

Prayer

O Saint GHOST, who haunts libraries fixed but never updated, let our changelogs always say 'security'. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by updating glibc and restarting everything, because a ghost in memory lingers as long as the process lives.

A bug fixed but not announced is half a bug still around.

Technical record

Disclosed on
January 28 2015
CVE
CVE-2015-0235

Heap-based buffer overflow in the __nss_hostname_digits_dots function in glibc 2.2, and other 2.x versions before 2.18, allows context-dependent attackers to execute arbitrary code via vectors related to the (1) gethostbyname or (2) gethostbyname2 function, aka "GHOST."

Sources: qualys.com · web.archive.org · blog.qualys.com

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