SECURITY ADVISORY [PSF-2006-001] Buffer overrun in repr() for UCS-4 encoded unicode strings

[Anthony Baxter]

           SECURITY ADVISORY [PSF-2006-001] 
 Buffer overrun in repr() for UCS-4 encoded unicode strings

     http://www.python.org/news/security/PSF-2006-001/

Advisory ID:  PSF-2006-001
Issue Date:   October 12, 2006
Product:      Python
Versions:     2.2, 2.3, 2.4 prior to 2.4.4, wide unicode (UCS-4) builds only
CVE Names:    CAN-2006-4980

Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. 
It is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme or Java.

The Python development team has discovered a flaw in the repr() implementation 
of Unicode string objects which can lead to execution of arbitrary code due 
to an overflow in a buffer allocated with insufficient size.

The flaw only manifests itself in Python builds configured to support UCS-4 
Unicode strings (using the --enable-unicode=ucs4 configure flag). This is 
still not the default, which is why the vulnerability should not be present 
in most Python builds out there, especially not the builds for the Windows or 
Mac OS X platform provided by www.python.org.

You can find out whether you are running a UCS-4 enabled build by looking at 
the sys.maxunicode attribute: it is 65535 in a UCS-2 build and 1114111 in a 
UCS-4 build.

More information can be found in this posting to the python-dev mailing list: 
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-October/069260.html

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned 
the name CAN-2006-4980 to this issue.

Python 2.4.4 will be released from www.python.org next week containing a fix 
for this issue. A release candidate of 2.4.4 is already available containing 
the fix. Python 2.5 also already contains the fix and is not vulnerable.

Patches for Python 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 are also immediately available:

 * http://python.org/files/news/security/PSF-2006-001/patch-2.3.txt
     (Python 2.2, 2.3)
 * http://python.org/files/news/security/PSF-2006-001/patch-2.4.txt 
     (Python 2.4) 

Acknowledgement: thanks to Benjamin C. Wiley Sittler for discovering this 
issue.

The official URL for this security advisory is
http://www.python.org/news/security/PSF-2006-001/
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