libass: Out-of-bounds bit clears for negative Matroska ReadOrder values

Overview

libass is a portable subtitle renderer for the ASS/SSA (Advanced Substation Alpha/Substation Alpha) subtitle format. From 0.17.4 until 0.17.5, libass event pruning does not guard negative Matroska ReadOrder values, allowing an attacker to clear arbitrarily many bits to zero at attacker-controlled positions near the NULL pointer. Exploitation requires a malicious Matroska stream loaded through ass_process_chunk, enabled read-order checking, and later pruning of the malicious events. Read-order checking is enabled by default unless ass_set_check_readorder is called with zero; pruning must occur explicitly through ass_prune_events or through automatic pruning previously enabled with ass_configure_prune. On common systems with arithmetic right shift, 32-bit int values, the upper address region reserved to the kernel, and matching binary/kernel architecture, the expected consequence is denial of service. More extensive exploitation on uncommon systems is theoretical and strongly constrained by the target addresses, bit-clearing-only mutation, and ASLR. This issue is fixed in version 0.17.5.

Affected

• libass >= 0.17.4, < 0.17.5

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.