Microsoft Uncovers Flaws in ncurses Library Affecting Linux and macOS Systems
A set of memory corruption flaws have been discovered in the ncurses (short for new curses) programming library that could be exploited by threat actors to run malicious code on vulnerable Linux and macOS systems. "Using environment variable poisoning, attackers could chain these vulnerabilities to elevate privileges and run code in the targeted program's context or perform other malicious actions," Microsoft Threat Intelligence researchers Jonathan Bar Or, Emanuele Cozzi, and Michael Pearse said in a technical report published today. The vulnerabilities, collectively tracked as CVE-2023-29491 (CVSS score of 7.8), have been addressed as of April 2023. Microsoft said it also worked with Apple on remediating the macOS-specific issues related to these flaws. Environment variables are user-defined values that can be used by multiple programs on a system and can affect the manner in which they behave on the system. Man...