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Red Hat Enterprise Linux: RHSA-2021-4033-01 Moderate: Unicode Threats

red hat
Calendar Grey November 1, 2021
Dist Redhat Esm H88
Important revision for binutils in Red Hat with medium severity, focusing on vulnerabilities arising from Unicode BiDi character exploitation.
An update for binutils is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

Solution

For details on how to apply this update, which includes the changes described in this advisory, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

Summary

The binutils packages provide a collection of binary utilities for the manipulation of object code in various object file formats. It includes the ar, as, gprof, ld, nm, objcopy, objdump, ranlib, readelf, size, strings, strip, and addr2line utilities.
Security Fix(es):
* Developer environment: Unicode's bidirectional (BiDi) override characterscan cause trojan source attacks (CVE-2021-42574)
The following changes were introduced in binutils in order to facilitate detection of BiDi Unicode characters:
Tools which display names or strings (readelf, strings, nm, objdump) have a new command line option --unicode / -U which controls how Unicode characters are handled.
Using "--unicode=default" will treat them as normal for the tool. This is the default behaviour when --unicode option is not used. Using "--unicode=locale" will display them according to the current locale. Using "--unicode=hex" will display them as hex byte values. Using "--unicode=escape" will display them as Unicode escape sequences. Using "--unicode=highlight" will display them as Unicode escape sequences highlighted in red, if supported by the output device.
For more details about the security issue(s), including the impact, a CVSS score, acknowledgments, and other related information, refer to the CVE page(s) listed in the References section.

References

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2021-42574 https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification#moderate https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/RHSB-2021-007

Package List

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client (v. 7):
Source: binutils-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.src.rpm
x86_64: binutils-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.x86_64.rpm binutils-debuginfo-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.x86_64.rpm
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client Optional (v. 7):
x86_64: binutils-debuginfo-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.i686.rpm binutils-debuginfo-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.x86_64.rpm binutils-devel-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.i686.rpm binutils-devel-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.x86_64.rpm
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ComputeNode (v. 7):
Source: binutils-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.src.rpm
x86_64: binutils-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.x86_64.rpm binutils-debuginfo-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.x86_64.rpm
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ComputeNode Optional (v. 7):
x86_64: binutils-debuginfo-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.i686.rpm binutils-debuginfo-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.x86_64.rpm binutils-devel-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.i686.rpm binutils-devel-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.x86_64.rpm
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (v. 7):
Source: binutils-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.src.rpm
ppc64: binutils-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.ppc64.rpm binutils-debuginfo-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.ppc.rpm binutils-debuginfo-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.ppc64.rpm binutils-devel-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.ppc.rpm binutils-devel-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.ppc64.rpm
ppc64le: binutils-2.27-44.base.el7_9.1.ppc64le.rpm

Read the Full Advisory


Advisory ID: RHSA-2021:4033-01
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Issue date: 2021-11-01

Topic

An update for binutils is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impactof Moderate. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, whichgives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability fromthe CVE link(s) in the References section.

Relevant Releases Architectures

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client (v. 7) - x86_64

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client Optional (v. 7) - x86_64

Red Hat Enterprise Linux ComputeNode (v. 7) - x86_64

Red Hat Enterprise Linux ComputeNode Optional (v. 7) - x86_64

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (v. 7) - ppc64, ppc64le, s390x, x86_64

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation (v. 7) - x86_64

Bugs Fixed

2005819 - CVE-2021-42574 Developer environment: Unicode's bidirectional (BiDi) override characters can cause trojan source attacks

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