Two flaws affect some version of the popular VLC media player

[steven36]

The VLC open-source media player is affected by two security vulnerabilities that can allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on vulnerable machines.

Some versions of the popular VLC open-source media player are affected by two memory corruption vulnerabilities that could be exploited by an attacker to run arbitrary code on vulnerable machines. The couple of vulnerabilities was discovered by the security researcher Veysel Hatas, which reported them to VideoLAN in December.

One of the vulnerabilities is a write access flaw and the other is a DEP access violation flaw. Both vulnerabilities have not been fixed by VideoLAN, the organization that maintains VLC, for this reason, Veysel Hatas decided to publicly disclose the flaw by publishing two advisories.

The vulnerabilities affect version 2.1.5 of VLC media player, but it is important to highlight that they could be exploited only on outdated Windows XP operating system that is no longer supported by Microsoft.

Below the descriptions for both VLC media player vulnerabilities:for both VLC media player vulnerabilities:for both VLC media player vulnerabilities:

Title : VLC Player 2.1.5 DEP Access Violation Vulnerability

“VLC Media Player contains a flaw that is triggered as user-supplied input is not properly sanitized when handling a specially crafted FLV file. This may allow a context-dependent attacker to corrupt memory and potentially execute arbitrary code,” reads the advisory.

VLC Player 2.1.5 Write Access Violation Vulnerability

“VLC Media Player contains a flaw that is triggered as user-supplied input is not properly sanitized when handling a specially crafted M2V file. This may allow a context-dependent attacker to corrupt memory and potentially execute arbitrary code,” the advisory says.

The advisories confirmed VLC hasn’t provided any patch for the two bugs.

Stay tuned … meantime upgrade your OS ;-) ;)

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[steven36]

More News : VideoLAN Says Flaws Exist in Codecs Library, Not VLC

Two vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited for arbitrary code execution exist in libavcodec, a free and open-source audio/video codecs library used by several popular media players.

The issues were discovered last year by Turkey-based researcher Veysel Hatas. Hatas said the vulnerabilities exist in the VLC media player and even got the MITRE Corporation to assign them CVE identifiers.

However, VideoLAN, the non-profit organization that develops VLC, pointed out that the security holes actually exist in libavcodec, which is used as the main decoding engine not only by VLC, but several other media players as well, including Xine and MPlayer.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the president of VideoLAN and one of the lead developers of VLC, believes that assigning the CVEs to VLC is “ just wrong.”

“This is not a VLC security issue, but a libavcodec one,” Kempf told SecurityWeek in an email. “The researcher was told numerous times, but refused to acknowledge it.”

In his advisory, Hatas said the security holes can be exploited by a context-dependent attacker to corrupt memory and possibly execute arbitrary code.

The researcher says the first vulnerability is a DEP access violation bug (CVE-2014-9597).

“VLC Media Player contains a flaw that is triggered as user-supplied input is not properly sanitized when handling a specially crafted FLV file,” reads the advisory published last week.

In the case of the second issue (CVE-2014-9598), which has been described as a write access violation vulnerability by the researcher, the attack involves specially crafted .M2V files.

Hatas said he successfully reproduced the vulnerabilities on VLC 2.1.5, the latest stable version of the media player, on Windows XP SP3.

Kempf has pointed out that VLC 2.1.5 on Linux is not affected because an updated version of the library is used. He has also highlighted that the vulnerability doesn’t affect VLC 2.2.0-rc2 on any operating system.

Representatives of the FFmpeg team, which develops the libavcodec library, told SecurityWeek that they were unable to reproduce the issues reported by Hatas on VLC 2.1.5 running on Windows 7. The developers have tested both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of VLC.

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