CVE-2015-9542

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 3.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2020-02-24 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-787

Description

add_password in pam_radius_auth.c in pam_radius 1.4.0 does not correctly check the length of the input password, and is vulnerable to a stack-based buffer overflow during memcpy(). An attacker could send a crafted password to an application (loading the pam_radius library) and crash it. Arbitrary code execution might be possible, depending on the application, C library, compiler, and other factors.

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 12.04, 14.04, 16.04, 18.04, 19.10
Debian Linux: 8.0, 9.0
freeradius Pam Radius: 1.4.0

References

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2015-9542
https://github.com/FreeRADIUS/pam_radius/commit/01173ec2426627dbb1e0d96c06c3ffa0b14d36d0
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/02/msg00023.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/08/msg00000.html
https://usn.ubuntu.com/4290-1/
https://usn.ubuntu.com/4290-2/
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2015-9542
https://github.com/FreeRADIUS/pam_radius/commit/01173ec2426627dbb1e0d96c06c3ffa0b14d36d0
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/02/msg00023.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/08/msg00000.html
https://usn.ubuntu.com/4290-1/
https://usn.ubuntu.com/4290-2/

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