Security Advisory 1102

Summary           : Insufficient input validation in MKV demuxer
Date              : January 2011
Affected versions : VLC media player 1.1.6.1 and earlier
ID                : VideoLAN-SA-1102
CVE reference     : CVE-2011-0531

Details

When parsing an invalid MKV (Matroska or WebM) file, input validation are insufficient.

Impact

If successful, a malicious third party will be able to trigger execution of arbitrary code.

Threat mitigation

Exploitation of this issue requires the user to explicitly open a specially crafted file.

Workarounds

The user should refrain from opening files from untrusted third parties or accessing untrusted remote sites (or disable the VLC browser plugins), until the patch is applied.

Alternatively, the MKV demuxer plugin (libmkv_plugin.*) can be removed manually from the VLC plugin installation directory.

Solution

VLC media player 1.1.7 addresses this issue. Patches for older versions are available from the official VLC source code repositories.

Credits

This vulnerability was reported by Dan Rosenberg from VSR.

References

The VideoLAN project: http://www.videolan.org/
VLC official GIT repository: http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=commit;h=59491dcedffbf97612d2c572943b56ee4289dd07
Dan Rosenberg, VSR: http://www.vsecurity.com/

History

26 January 2011: Vendor notified
29 January 2011: Fixes delivered by Matroska
30 January 2011: Patches published; Security advisory published
31 January 2011: VLC media player 1.1.7 source released
1 February 2011: VLC media player 1.1.7 binaries released
7 February 2011: CVE ID released CVE-2011-0531

Rémi Denis-Courmont,
on behalf of the VideoLAN project