CVE-2015-8777

It was found that the dynamic loader did not sanitize the LD_POINTER_GUARD environment variable. An attacker could use this flaw to bypass the pointer guarding protection on set-user-ID or set-group-ID programs to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running the application.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.

The glibc pointer guard is a post-exploitation mitigation mechanism. As such, it is only relevant if there are exploitable security vulnerabilities in the system. Therefore, applying available security updates to the system is a possible mitigation for this issue.

In typical deployments, environment variables can only be set by users with shell access. Restricting shell access to trusted users is another possible mitigation.