Pierluigi Paganini January 20, 2015

The VLC open-source media player is affected by two security vulnerabilities that can allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on vulnerable machines.

Some versions of the popular VLC open-source media player are affected by two memory corruption vulnerabilities that could be exploited by an attacker to run arbitrary code on vulnerable machines. The couple of vulnerabilities was discovered by the security researcher Veysel Hatas, which reported them to VideoLAN in December.

One of the vulnerabilities is a write access flaw and the other is a DEP access violation flaw. Both vulnerabilities have not been fixed by VideoLAN, the organization that maintains VLC, for this reason, Veysel Hatas decided to publicly disclose the flaw by publishing two advisories.

The vulnerabilities affect version 2.1.5 of VLC media player, but it is important to highlight that they could be exploited only on outdated Windows XP operating system that is no longer supported by Microsoft.

Below the descriptions for both VLC media player vulnerabilities:for both VLC media player vulnerabilities:for both VLC media player vulnerabilities:

Title : VLC Player 2.1.5 DEP Access Violation Vulnerability

“VLC Media Player contains a flaw that is triggered as user-supplied input is not properly sanitized when handling a specially crafted FLV file. This may allow a context-dependent attacker to corrupt memory and potentially execute arbitrary code,” reads the advisory.

Title : VLC Player 2.1.5 Write Access Violation Vulnerability

“VLC Media Player contains a flaw that is triggered as user-supplied input is not properly sanitized when handling a specially crafted M2V file. This may allow a context-dependent attacker to corrupt memory and potentially execute arbitrary code,” the advisory says.

The advisories confirmed VLC hasn’t provided any patch for the two bugs.

Stay tuned … meantime upgrade your OS ;-)meantime upgrade your OS 😉

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  VLC, Windows XP)