[RHSA-2021:4038-01] Moderate: binutils security update

Mon Nov 1 07:43:25 UTC 2021

An update for binutils is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2
Advanced Update Support.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact
of Moderate. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which
gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from
the CVE link(s) in the References section.

2. Relevant releases/architectures:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server AUS (v. 7.2) - x86_64

3. Description:

The binutils packages provide a collection of binary utilities for the
manipulation of object code in various object file formats. It includes the
ar, as, gprof, ld, nm, objcopy, objdump, ranlib, readelf, size, strings,
strip, and addr2line utilities.

Security Fix(es):

* Developer environment: Unicode's bidirectional (BiDi) override characters
can cause trojan source attacks (CVE-2021-42574)

The following changes were introduced in binutils in order to facilitate
detection of BiDi Unicode characters:

Tools which display names or strings (readelf, strings, nm, objdump) have a
new command line option --unicode / -U which controls how Unicode
characters are handled.

Using "--unicode=default" will treat them as normal for the tool. This is
the default behaviour when --unicode option is not used.
Using "--unicode=locale" will display them according to the current locale.
Using "--unicode=hex" will display them as hex byte values.
Using "--unicode=escape" will display them as Unicode escape sequences.
Using "--unicode=highlight" will display them as Unicode escape sequences
highlighted in red, if supported by the output device.

For more details about the security issue(s), including the impact, a CVSS
score, acknowledgments, and other related information, refer to the CVE
page(s) listed in the References section.

4. Solution:

For details on how to apply this update, which includes the changes
described in this advisory, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

5. Bugs fixed (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/):

2005819 - CVE-2021-42574 Developer environment: Unicode's bidirectional (BiDi) override characters can cause trojan source attacks

6. Package List:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server AUS (v. 7.2):

Source:
binutils-2.23.52.0.1-55.el7_2.4.src.rpm

x86_64:
binutils-2.23.52.0.1-55.el7_2.4.x86_64.rpm
binutils-debuginfo-2.23.52.0.1-55.el7_2.4.i686.rpm
binutils-debuginfo-2.23.52.0.1-55.el7_2.4.x86_64.rpm
binutils-devel-2.23.52.0.1-55.el7_2.4.i686.rpm
binutils-devel-2.23.52.0.1-55.el7_2.4.x86_64.rpm

These packages are GPG signed by Red Hat for security.  Our key and
details on how to verify the signature are available from
https://access.redhat.com/security/team/key/

7. References:

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2021-42574
https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#moderate
https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/RHSB-2021-007

8. Contact:

The Red Hat security contact is <secalert at redhat.com>. More contact
details at https://access.redhat.com/security/team/contact/

Copyright 2021 Red Hat, Inc.
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