Zero-Day Advisory

Fortinet Discovers VLC Player AVI File Parsing Heap Corruption Vulnerability

Summary

Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs has discovered a heap corruption vulnerability in VideoLan VLC Media Player.

VLC Media Player is a popular media player software that supports many audio and video file formats.

A heap corruption vulnerability has been discovered in VLC Media Player. The vulnerability is caused by incorrectly parsing a crafted AVI file which causes a Write Access violation. It could allow malicious users to create code execution scenarios.

Solutions

FortiGuard Labs released the following FortiGate IPS signature which covers this specific vulnerability:

VideoLan.VLC.Player.AVI.File.Parsing.Heap.Corruption
Released Nov 04, 2016

Users should apply the solution provided by VideoLAN.

References

• https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/17448

  https://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc-branch/NEWS
  

Acknowledgement

This vulnerability was discovered by Xiaopeng Zhang of Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs.

IPS Subscription

Fortinet customers who subscribe to Fortinet's intrusion prevention (IPS) service should be protected against this vulnerability with the appropriate configuration parameters in place. Fortinet's IPS service is one component of FortiGuard Subscription Services, which also offer comprehensive solutions such as antivirus, Web content filtering and antispam capabilities. These services enable protection against threats on both application and network layers. FortiGuard Services are continuously updated by FortiGuard Labs, which enables Fortinet to deliver a combination of multi-layered security intelligence and true zero-day protection from new and emerging threats. These updates are delivered to all FortiGate, FortiMail and FortiClient products. Fortinet strictly follows responsible disclosure guidelines to ensure optimum protection during a threat's lifecycle.