Boost: Denial of service

Background

Boost is a set of C++ libraries, including the Boost.Regex library to process regular expressions.

Description

Tavis Ormandy and Will Drewry from the Google Security Team reported a failed assertion in file regex/v4/perl_matcher_non_recursive.hpp (CVE-2008-0171) and a NULL pointer dereference in function get_repeat_type() file basic_regex_creator.hpp (CVE-2008-0172) when processing regular expressions.

Impact

A remote attacker could provide specially crafted regular expressions to an application using Boost, resulting in a crash.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Boost users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=dev-libs/boost-1.34.1-r2"