Cryptography is the art of keeping information secure by transforming it into form that unintended recipients cannot understand. In cryptography, an original human readable message, referred to as plaintext, is changed by means of an algorithm, or series of mathematical operations, into something that to an uninformed observer would look like gibberish; this gibberish is called ciphertext.
Cryptographic systems require some method for the intended recipient to be able to make use of the encrypted message—usually, though not always, by transforming the ciphertext back into plaintext.
Felix Wilhelm reported that several buffer handling functions in
libxml2, a library providing support to read, modify and write XML and
HTML files, don’t check for integer overflows, resulting in
out-of-bounds memory writes if specially crafted, multi-gigabyte XML
files are processed. An attacker can take advantage of this flaw for
denial of service or execution of arbitrary code.
Several flaws have been discovered in HTCondor, a distributed workload
management system, which allow users with only READ access to any daemon to use
a different authentication method than the administrator has specified. If the
administrator has configured the READ or WRITE methods to include CLAIMTOBE,
then it is possible to impersonate another user and submit or remove jobs.
For the past week and a half, Greenland’s health service has reportedly been struggling to recover from a cyber attack that has crippled its IT systems, causing long waiting times and forcing doctors to resort to using pen and paper instead of computers.
Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.
