Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: RHSA-2015:0016-01 Moderate Glibc Issues

The glibc packages provide the standard C libraries (libc), POSIX thread libraries (libpthread), standard math libraries (libm), and the Name Server Caching Daemon (nscd) used by multiple programs on the system. Without these libraries, the Linux system cannot function correctly.
An out-of-bounds read flaw was found in the way glibc's iconv() function converted certain encoded data to UTF-8. An attacker able to make an application call the iconv() function with a specially crafted argument could use this flaw to crash that application. (CVE-2014-6040)
It was found that the wordexp() function would perform command substitution even when the WRDE_NOCMD flag was specified. An attacker able to provide specially crafted input to an application using the wordexp() function, and not sanitizing the input correctly, could potentially use this flaw to execute arbitrary commands with the credentials of the user running that application. (CVE-2014-7817)
The CVE-2014-7817 issue was discovered by Tim Waugh of the Red Hat Developer Experience Team.
This update also fixes the following bugs:
* Previously, when an address lookup using the getaddrinfo() function for the AF_UNSPEC value was performed on a defective DNS server, the server in some cases responded with a valid response for the A record, but a referral response for the AAAA record, which resulted in a lookup failure. A prior update was implemented for getaddrinfo() to return the valid response, but it contained a typographical error, due to which the lookup could under some circumstances still fail. This error has been corrected and getaddrinfo() now returns a valid response in the described circumstances. (BZ#1172023)
* An error in the dlopen() library function previously caused recursive calls to dlopen() to terminate unexpectedly or to abort with a library assertion. This error has been fixed and recursive calls to dlopen() no longer crash or abort. (BZ#1173469)
All glibc users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues.