What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2012-3405

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.0 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2014-02-10 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-189

Description

The vfprintf function in stdio-common/vfprintf.c in libc in GNU C Library (aka glibc) 2.14 and other versions does not properly calculate a buffer length, which allows context-dependent attackers to bypass the FORTIFY_SOURCE format-string protection mechanism and cause a denial of service (segmentation fault and crash) via a format string with a large number of format specifiers that triggers "desynchronization within the buffer size handling," a different vulnerability than CVE-2012-3404.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 8.04, 10.04, 11.04, 11.10, 12.04
• GNU C Library (glibc): 2.14
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 6.0
• RedHat Enterprise Virtualization: 3.0

References

• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1098.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1200.html
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/07/11/17
• http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-1589-1
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=833704
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201503-04
• https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13446
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1098.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1200.html
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/07/11/17
• http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-1589-1
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=833704

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