SecurityFocus has a vulnerability advisory about an issue with the GNU strings command and a potential Denial of Service attack.  If a file contains certain character strings, the string command will crash due to a failure to properly handle unexpected user-supplied input.

The bugzilla entry 2584 authored by Jesus Olmos Gonzales, who discovered the issue, contains more information. It indicates the the issue actually lies within the bfd_hack_lookup() routine in the BFD library.

The results of initial testing done by several ISC Handlers made it appear that this was only affecting some Linux/Unix distributions and not others.  Further testing indicated that the "exploit" seems sensitive to the content of the triggering file.

If the file contained only the following line:

        %253Cc%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc

then running strings on the file would result in a segmentation fault.

If the file contained additional content, such as:

        This file will not crash
        %253Cc%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc

then running strings on the file did not result in a segmentation fault.

The potential security impact of this is an attacker might be able to include this character sequence in their executable thereby making it harder to do binary analysis with the strings command.

To test if you system is vulnerable to this issue, you can run the following commands:

       echo "%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc%253Cc" > evil-file
       strings evil-file

If you get a segmentation fault, you are vulnerable.

Results for some tested operating systems [1]:


        CentOS 4.3 - vulnerable
        Fedora Core 4 - vulnerable
        Mac OS X 10.4.5 - NOT vulnerable
        OpenBSD 3.5 - vulnerable
        OpenBSD 3.9 - vulnerable

       Cygwin - vulnerable
Updates thanks to our readers (5/24/06):
       Gentoo (binutils 2.16.1-r2)
       Ubuntu Linux 5.10
       Ubuntu Linux 5.4
       Debian 3.1
       Gentoo 2006.0
       SuSE Enterprise 9 SP3
       FreeBSD 5.4 (-STABLE and -RELEASE-p10)
       FreeBSD 6.0
       Fedora Core 3
      
Note: Some systems have strings-GNU (vulnerable) and strings (BSD/not vulnerable)

    
Update 1:

Here is a workaround that may work for some folks.  Run the strings command with the "-a" option.  This says to scan the whole file instead of just the "initialized and loaded sections of object files".  When "strings -a evil-file" ran, it did not result in a segmentation fault.  (Thanks Swa)

[1] - "vulnerable" meaning that the included version of the "strings" command will segment fault.