Freeciv: Denial of service

Background

Freeciv is an open source turn-based multiplayer strategy game, similar to the famous Civilization series.

Description

Luigi Auriemma discovered that Freeciv could be tricked into the allocation of enormous chunks of memory when trying to uncompress malformed data packages, possibly leading to an out of memory condition which causes Freeciv to crash or freeze.

Impact

A remote attacker could exploit this issue to cause a Denial of Service by sending specially crafted data packages to the Freeciv game server.

Workaround

Play solo games or restrict your multiplayer games to trusted parties.

Resolution

All Freeciv users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=games-strategy/freeciv-2.0.8"