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HIGH

GNU Wget: heap overflow in HTTP protocol handling

Published Oct 27, 2017

Description

The retr.c:fd_read_body() function is called when processing OK responses. When the response is sent chunked in wget before 1.19.2, the chunk parser uses strtol() to read each chunk's length, but doesn't check that the chunk length is a non-negative number. The code then tries to read the chunk in pieces of 8192 bytes by using the MIN() macro, but ends up passing the negative chunk length to retr.c:fd_read(). As fd_read() takes an int argument, the high 32 bits of the chunk length are discarded, leaving fd_read() with a completely attacker controlled length argument. The attacker can corrupt malloc metadata after the allocated buffer.

Affected products

Remediation

Red Hat statement

This issue affects the versions of wget as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. This issue did not affect the versions of wget as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6.

Metrics

References (12)

Change history (0)

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Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner certcc
Published Oct 27, 2017
Updated Sep 16, 2024
Reserved Aug 22, 2017
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Important
Public date Oct 26, 2017