Debian: DSA-2161-2 moderate: openjdk floating point parser DoS

debian

February 14, 2011

It was discovered that the floating point parser in OpenJDK, an implementation of the Java platform, can enter an infinite loop when processing certain input strings

Topics Covered

security advisory denial of service debian openjdk floating point parser

Summary

It was discovered that the floating point parser in OpenJDK, an
implementation of the Java platform, can enter an infinite loop when
processing certain input strings. Such input strings represent valid
numbers and can be contained in data supplied by an attacker over the
network, leading to a denial-of-service attack.

For the old stable distribution (lenny), this problem has been fixed
in version 6b18-1.8.3-2~lenny1.

Note that this update introduces an OpenJDK package based on the
IcedTea release 1.8.3 into the old stable distribution. This
addresses several dozen security vulnerabilities, most of which are
only exploitable by malicious mobile code. A notable exception is
CVE-2009-3555, the TLS renegotiation vulnerability. This update
implements the protocol extension described in RFC 5746, addressing
this issue.

This update also includes a new version of Hotspot, the Java virtual
machine, which increases the default heap size on machines with
several GB of RAM. If you run several JVMs on the ...