VideoLAN Security Advisory 1103 - VideoLAN
VideoLAN, a project and a non-profit organization.

Security Advisory 1103

Summary           : Heap corruption in MP4 demultiplexer
Date              : April 2011
Affected versions : VLC media player 1.1.8 down to 1.0.0
ID                : VideoLAN-SA-1103
CVE reference     : CVE-2011-1684

Details

When parsing some MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) files, insufficient buffer size might lead to corruption of the heap.

Impact

If successful, it is unknown whether a malicious third party might be able to trigger execution of arbitrary code. Successful exploitation of this bug can crash the process of the media player.

Threat mitigation

Exploitation of this issue requires the user to explicitly open an MP4 file with some specific content.

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 MP4 decoder plugin (libmp4_plugin.*) can be removed manually from the VLC plugin installation directory.

Solution

VLC media player 1.1.9 will address this issue. Patches for older versions are available from the official VLC source code repositories.

Credits

This vulnerability was reported by Aliz Hammond.

References

The VideoLAN project
http://www.videolan.org/
VLC official GIT repository
http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=commit;h=5637ca8141bf39f263ecdb62035d2cb45c740821

History

7 April 2011
Vendor notified
9 April 2011
Patches published
Security advisory published
12 April 2011
VLC media player 1.1.9 released
13 April 2011
CVE ID reserved
Rémi Denis-Courmont,
on behalf of the VideoLAN project