Summary : Multiple vulnerabilities fixed in VLC media player
Date : December 2020
Affected versions : VLC media player 3.0.11 and earlier
ID : VideoLAN-SB-VLC-3012
Details
A remote user could create a specifically crafted file that could trigger some various issues, notably 2 read buffer overflows, and some invalid pointers being dereferenced.
Impact
If successful, a malicious third party could trigger either a crash of VLC or an arbitratry code execution with the privileges of the target user.
While these issues in themselves are most likely to just crash the player, we can't exclude that they could be combined to leak user informations or
remotely execute code. ASLR and DEP help reduce the likelyness of code execution, but may be bypassed.
We have not seen exploits performing code execution through these vulnerability
Threat mitigation
Exploitation of those issues requires the user to explicitly open a specially crafted file or stream.
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.
Solution
VLC media player 3.0.12 addresses the issue.
Credits
All but one of the issues fixed in this version have been reported by Zhen Zhou, NSFOCUS Security Team
