VIR Vulnerability Intelligence Relay

CVE-2012-3406

medium
Published 2014-02-10 · Modified 2026-04-29
CVSS v3
—
CVSS v2
6.8
VIR risk
6.8

Description

The vfprintf function in stdio-common/vfprintf.c in GNU C Library (aka glibc) 2.5, 2.12, and probably other versions does not "properly restrict the use of" the alloca function when allocating the SPECS array, which allows context-dependent attackers to bypass the FORTIFY_SOURCE format-string protection mechanism and cause a denial of service (crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via a crafted format string using positional parameters and a large number of format specifiers, a different vulnerability than CVE-2012-3404 and CVE-2012-3405.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
Patch ETA
—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

vendor Authored 2026-05-27

Vendor advisory: debian — https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2012-3406

OS impact
OSVersionStatusFixed in
debian debianbookwormfixed2.19-14
debian debianbullseyefixed2.19-14
debian debianforkyfixed2.19-14
debian debiansidfixed2.19-14
debian debiantrixiefixed2.19-14
redhat rhel5affected
redhat rhel6.0affected
ubuntu ubuntu8.04affected
ubuntu ubuntu10.04affected
ubuntu ubuntu11.04affected
ubuntu ubuntu11.10affected
ubuntu ubuntu12.04affected

Application impact
VendorProductVersionsFixed
gnuglibc2.5
gnuglibc2.12
redhatenterprise_virtualization3.0

References

CWEs

CWE-264

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.