[fprint] Minor security hole in libfprint (with fix included)

Vasily Khoruzhick anarsoul at gmail.com
Fri Aug 19 05:56:53 UTC 2016


Hi Alan,

Thanks for your e-mail and patch.

I expect it to be in worst case some re-used memory of libfprint, so
it's not really a security leak, since the only sensitive information
is saved to the disk. But I'll take your patch.

Regards,
Vasily

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 3:01 PM, Alan Davidson <alan at key.me> wrote:
> Hi libfprint folks -
>
> I was enrolling fingerprints and saving the data to files (using
> fp_print_data_get_data), when I noticed that the data section for the
> minutiae had interesting stuff in the unused parts. This is to say, the
> xyt_struct (from bozorth.h) allocates space for 200 minutiae, and if I only
> use 50 of them, the other 150 are still allocated and have stuff in them.
> These values come from things that were previously allocated and deallocated
> on the heap, and the data is still there because it wasn't zeroed out when
> we re-allocated it.
>
> I think it should be zeroed out, to prevent leaking whatever used to be in
> this memory. What do you think? It's a very easy change; see the commit at
> [1], though I'm unclear how to transfer it to your repo. Without this
> change, enrolled fingerprints saved to file on my computer have non-null
> data in the unused minutiae, and with it, all the unused minutiae are full
> of null bytes.
>
> A little more detail: this happens in fpi_img_to_print_data (in img.c), when
> we create a new item to store the minutiae in xyt format. The data is later
> copied wholesale into the output buffer in fp_print_data_get_data.
>
> Thanks for taking a look!
>
>  - Alan
>
> [1]
> https://github.com/keyme/libfprint/commit/1b71aff9ea389c427f9f8bfaabf8aa0acde37269
>
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