Andrew Bartlett of Catalyst reported a defect affecting certain applications using the Libevent evbuffer API. This defect leaves applications which pass insanely large inputs to evbuffers open to a possible heap overflow or infinite loop. In order to exploit this flaw, an attacker needs to be able to find a way to provoke the program into trying to make a buffer chunk larger than what will fit into a single size_t or off_t.

For the stable distribution (wheezy), this problem has been fixed in version 2.0.19-stable-3+deb7u1. For the upcoming stable distribution (jessie) and the unstable distribution (sid), this problem will be fixed soon. We recommend that you upgrade your libevent packages.

libevent on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

• http://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3119.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25