Fortinet Discovers Multiple MariaDB 'Regular Expression' Parsing Denial of Service Vulnerabilities

Summary

Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs has discovered multiple denial of service vulnerabilities in MariaDB.
MariaDB is an enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL. It remains free under the GNU GPL. MariaDB strives to be the logical choice for database professionals looking for a robust, scalable, and reliable SQL server.
These discovered vulnerabilities are caused due to incorrectly handling specially crafted regular expressions. They could be exploited by attackers via crafted regular expression with the REGEXP_SUBSTR function.

Solutions

FortiGuard Labs released the following FortiGate IPS signature which covers this specific vulnerability:

MariaDB.PCRE.Handling.Multiple.Remote.DoS
Released Apr 22, 2015
Users should apply the solution provided by MariaDB.

Additional Information

The vulnerabilities actually exist in the 3rd-party PCRE library incorporated into MariaDB. The PCRE library 8.37 has fixed them.

Acknowledgement

These vulnerabilities were discovered by Kai Lu of Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs.

IPS Subscription

Fortinet customers who subscribe to Fortinet's intrusion prevention (IPS) service should be protected against this vulnerability with the appropriate configuration parameters in place. Fortinet's IPS service is one component of FortiGuard Subscription Services, which also offer comprehensive solutions such as antivirus, Web content filtering and antispam capabilities. These services enable protection against threats on both application and network layers. FortiGuard Services are continuously updated by FortiGuard Labs, which enables Fortinet to deliver a combination of multi-layered security intelligence and true zero-day protection from new and emerging threats. These updates are delivered to all FortiGate, FortiMail and FortiClient products. Fortinet strictly follows responsible disclosure guidelines to ensure optimum protection during a threat's lifecycle.