What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2012-3406

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.8 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 3.2% 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-264

Description

The vfprintf function in stdio-common/vfprintf.c in GNU C Library (aka glibc) 2.5, 2.12, and probably other versions does not "properly restrict the use of" the alloca function when allocating the SPECS array, which allows context-dependent attackers to bypass the FORTIFY_SOURCE format-string protection mechanism and cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via a crafted format string using positional parameters and a large number of format specifiers, a different vulnerability than CVE-2012-3404 and CVE-2012-3405.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 8.04, 10.04, 11.04, 11.10, 12.04
• GNU C Library (glibc): 2.5, 2.12
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 5, 6.0
• RedHat Enterprise Virtualization: 3.0

References

• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1097.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1098.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1185.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/attachment.cgi?id=594722
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=826943
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201503-04
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1097.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1098.html
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-1185.html

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