Several security issues were fixed in gdb.
Hanno Böck discovered that gdb incorrectly handled certain malformed AOUT headers in PE executables. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a specially crafted binary, a remote attacker could use this issue to cause gdb to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. This issue only applied to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. (CVE-2014-8501)
26 July 2017
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Several security issues were fixed in gdb.
Hanno Böck discovered that gdb incorrectly handled certain malformed AOUT headers in PE executables. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a specially crafted binary, a remote attacker could use this issue to cause gdb to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. This issue only applied to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. (CVE-2014-8501)
It was discovered that gdb incorrectly handled printing bad bytes in Intel Hex objects. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a specially crafted binary, a remote attacker could use this issue to cause gdb to crash, resulting in a denial of service. This issue only applied to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. (CVE-2014-9939)
It was discovered that gdb incorrectly handled certain string operations. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a specially crafted binary, a remote attacker could use this issue to cause gdb to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code. This issue only applied to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. (CVE-2016-2226)
It was discovered that gdb incorrectly handled parsing certain binaries. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a specially crafted binary, a remote attacker could use this issue to cause gdb to crash, resulting in a denial of service. This issue only applied to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. (CVE-2016-4487, CVE-2016-4488, CVE-2016-4489, CVE-2016-4490, CVE-2016-4492, CVE-2016-4493, CVE-2016-6131)
It was discovered that gdb incorrectly handled parsing certain binaries. If a user or automated system were tricked into processing a specially crafted binary, a remote attacker could use this issue to cause gdb to crash, resulting in a denial of service. (CVE-2016-4491)
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.
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