<note>

<title>Release Date</title>

<simpara>2015-05-21</simpara>

<simpara>2015-05-22</simpara>

</note>

<para>

<listitem>

<para>

Consistently check for failure of the <function>*printf()</> family of

functions (Noah Misch)

Improve detection of system-call failures (Noah Misch)

</para>

<para>

Most calls of these functions did not consider the possibility that

the functions could fail with, eg, out-of-memory conditions. The usual

result would just be missing output, but crashes or exposure of

unintended information are also possible. To protect against such

risks uniformly, create wrappers around these functions that throw an

error on failure. Also add missing error checks to a few

security-relevant calls of other system functions.

Our replacement implementation of <function>snprintf()</> failed to

check for errors reported by the underlying system library calls;

the main case that might be missed is out-of-memory situations.

In the worst case this might lead to information exposure, due to our

code assuming that a buffer had been overwritten when it hadn't been.

Also, there were a few places in which security-relevant calls of other

system library functions did not check for failure.

</para>

<para>

It remains possible that some calls of the <function>*printf()</>

family of functions are vulnerable to information disclosure if an

out-of-memory error occurs at just the wrong time. We judge the risk

to not be large, but will continue analysis in this area.

(CVE-2015-3166)

</para>

</listitem>