Included gzip 1.2.4 has several vulnerabilities

[Cs-gon]

The included gzip version is quite old (version 1.2.4) and has several security vulnerabilities.

Check http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search-results?adv_search=true&cves=on&cpe_version=cpe:/a:gnu:gzip:1.2.4 for example.

I explicitly checked for CVE-2001-1228, which was not fixed by a patch in the klibc package, so I assume the other vulnerabilities are not fixed either.

I think it would be a good idea to update the included gzip to a current version.

[Cs-gon (cs-gon)]

Will this security vulnerability get fixed at all? I realize that the impact is pretty small, because someone would have to explicitly use the gzip binary provided with klibc. But even the new klibc package in trusty/utopic/vivid still contains the old 1.2.4 version of gzip.

[Thorsten Glaser (mirabilos)]

I have just looked at whether gzip can be replaced by BSD compress(1), which is a drop-in replacement under a more free licence, but even after adding fts and a lot of BSD functions it still needs funopen() which klibc doesn’t have ☹

[Thorsten Glaser (mirabilos)]

Nevermind. I hacked MirBSD compress to omit the BSD compress method (so it only does gzip), and replaced a few more things, and got a working gzip/gunzip under BSD licence.

If there is any interest in the klibc side to include that, be my guest. Sizes are nice, too (dynamically linked):

tglase@tglase:~/mbsd/src/usr.bin/compress $ size /usr/lib/klibc/bin/gzip obj/compress
   text data bss dec hex filename
  25828 3016 316552 345396 54534 /usr/lib/klibc/bin/gzip
  18802 0 4208 23010 59e2 obj/compress

[Thorsten Glaser (mirabilos)]

As I mentioned in IRC: I can probably easily shave another 2½K off .text by removing stub support for multiple compressors and using the gzopen() API already shipped by klibc.

Note that klibc bundles zlib 1.2.3 whereas even MirBSD has 1.2.8 already. That would also need updating. But at least, MirBSD compress uses zlib for gzip I/O instead of bundling its own inflate/deflate functions as GNU gzip does.

All is 2-clause and 3-clause BSD and MIT licence.