Vulnerability Discovered byAleksandar Nikolic

Overview

Talos is disclosing TALOS-2017-0274/CVE-2017-2784, a code execution vulnerability in ARM MbedTLS. This vulnerability is specifically related to how MbedTLS handles x509 certificates. MbedTLS is an SSL/TLS implementation aimed specifically at embedded devices that was previously known as PolarSSL.

The vulnerability exists in the part of the code responsible for handling elliptic curve cryptography keys. An attacker can trigger this vulnerability by providing a specially crafted x509 certificate to the target which performs a series of checks on the certificate. While performing these checks the application fails to properly parse the public key. This results in the invalid free of a stack pointer. There is a mitigating factor associated with this vulnerability in that the memory space that is pointed to is zeroed out shortly before the vulnerability is triggered. However, since it's designed to be used in embedded platforms that may not have modern heap exploitation mitigations in place it may be possible to achieve code execution in certain circumstances.  Full details of the vulnerability are available in ouradvisory.

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