Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Aus

A vulnerability was found in Podman, Buildah, and CRI-O

CVE-2024-9676 6.5 - Medium - October 15, 2024

A vulnerability was found in Podman, Buildah, and CRI-O. A symlink traversal vulnerability in the containers/storage library can cause Podman, Buildah, and CRI-O to hang and result in a denial of service via OOM kill when running a malicious image using an automatically assigned user namespace (`--userns=auto` in Podman and Buildah). The containers/storage library will read /etc/passwd inside the container, but does not properly validate if that file is a symlink, which can be used to cause the library to read an arbitrary file on the host.

Directory traversal

A vulnerability was found in Buildah

CVE-2024-9675 7.8 - High - October 09, 2024

A vulnerability was found in Buildah. Cache mounts do not properly validate that user-specified paths for the cache are within our cache directory, allowing a `RUN` instruction in a Container file to mount an arbitrary directory from the host (read/write) into the container as long as those files can be accessed by the user running Buildah.

Directory traversal

A null pointer dereference flaw was found in Libtiff via `tif_dirinfo.c`

CVE-2024-7006 7.5 - High - August 12, 2024

A null pointer dereference flaw was found in Libtiff via `tif_dirinfo.c`. This issue may allow an attacker to trigger memory allocation failures through certain means, such as restricting the heap space size or injecting faults, causing a segmentation fault. This can cause an application crash, eventually leading to a denial of service.

NULL Pointer Dereference

OpenSSH Race Condition leading to RCE, known as regreSSHion

CVE-2024-6387 8.1 - High - July 01, 2024

A security regression (CVE-2006-5051) was discovered in OpenSSH's server (sshd). There is a race condition which can lead sshd to handle some signals in an unsafe manner. An unauthenticated, remote attacker may be able to trigger it by failing to authenticate within a set time period.

Race Condition

net-snmp provides various tools relating to the Simple Network Management Protocol

CVE-2022-24805 8.8 - High - April 16, 2024

net-snmp provides various tools relating to the Simple Network Management Protocol. Prior to version 5.9.2, a buffer overflow in the handling of the `INDEX` of `NET-SNMP-VACM-MIB` can cause an out-of-bounds memory access. A user with read-only credentials can exploit the issue. Version 5.9.2 contains a patch. Users should use strong SNMPv3 credentials and avoid sharing the credentials. Those who must use SNMPv1 or SNMPv2c should use a complex community string and enhance the protection by restricting access to a given IP address range.

Classic Buffer Overflow

net-snmp provides various tools relating to the Simple Network Management Protocol

CVE-2022-24806 5.3 - Medium - April 16, 2024

net-snmp provides various tools relating to the Simple Network Management Protocol. Prior to version 5.9.2, a user with read-write credentials can exploit an Improper Input Validation vulnerability when SETing malformed OIDs in master agent and subagent simultaneously. Version 5.9.2 contains a patch. Users should use strong SNMPv3 credentials and avoid sharing the credentials. Those who must use SNMPv1 or SNMPv2c should use a complex community string and enhance the protection by restricting access to a given IP address range.

net-snmp provides various tools relating to the Simple Network Management Protocol

CVE-2022-24807 6.5 - Medium - April 16, 2024

net-snmp provides various tools relating to the Simple Network Management Protocol. Prior to version 5.9.2, a malformed OID in a SET request to `SNMP-VIEW-BASED-ACM-MIB::vacmAccessTable` can cause an out-of-bounds memory access. A user with read-write credentials can exploit the issue. Version 5.9.2 contains a patch. Users should use strong SNMPv3 credentials and avoid sharing the credentials. Those who must use SNMPv1 or SNMPv2c should use a complex community string and enhance the protection by restricting access to a given IP address range.

Classic Buffer Overflow

net-snmp provides various tools relating to the Simple Network Management Protocol

CVE-2022-24808 6.5 - Medium - April 16, 2024

net-snmp provides various tools relating to the Simple Network Management Protocol. Prior to version 5.9.2, a user with read-write credentials can use a malformed OID in a `SET` request to `NET-SNMP-AGENT-MIB::nsLogTable` to cause a NULL pointer dereference. Version 5.9.2 contains a patch. Users should use strong SNMPv3 credentials and avoid sharing the credentials. Those who must use SNMPv1 or SNMPv2c should use a complex community string and enhance the protection by restricting access to a given IP address range.

NULL Pointer Dereference

net-snmp provides various tools relating to the Simple Network Management Protocol

CVE-2022-24809 6.5 - Medium - April 16, 2024

net-snmp provides various tools relating to the Simple Network Management Protocol. Prior to version 5.9.2, a user with read-only credentials can use a malformed OID in a `GET-NEXT` to the `nsVacmAccessTable` to cause a NULL pointer dereference. Version 5.9.2 contains a patch. Users should use strong SNMPv3 credentials and avoid sharing the credentials. Those who must use SNMPv1 or SNMPv2c should use a complex community string and enhance the protection by restricting access to a given IP address range.

NULL Pointer Dereference

A heap overflow flaw was found in 389-ds-base

CVE-2024-1062 - February 12, 2024

A heap overflow flaw was found in 389-ds-base. This issue leads to a denial of service when writing a value larger than 256 chars in log_entry_attr.

Heap-based Buffer Overflow

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's NVMe driver

CVE-2023-6356 7.5 - High - February 07, 2024

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's NVMe driver. This issue may allow an unauthenticated malicious actor to send a set of crafted TCP packages when using NVMe over TCP, leading the NVMe driver to a NULL pointer dereference in the NVMe driver and causing kernel panic and a denial of service.

NULL Pointer Dereference

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's NVMe driver

CVE-2023-6535 7.5 - High - February 07, 2024

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's NVMe driver. This issue may allow an unauthenticated malicious actor to send a set of crafted TCP packages when using NVMe over TCP, leading the NVMe driver to a NULL pointer dereference in the NVMe driver, causing kernel panic and a denial of service.

NULL Pointer Dereference

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's NVMe driver

CVE-2023-6536 7.5 - High - February 07, 2024

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's NVMe driver. This issue may allow an unauthenticated malicious actor to send a set of crafted TCP packages when using NVMe over TCP, leading the NVMe driver to a NULL pointer dereference in the NVMe driver, causing kernel panic and a denial of service.

NULL Pointer Dereference

A vulnerability was found in OpenSC where PKCS#1 encryption padding removal is not implemented as side-channel resistant

CVE-2023-5992 5.9 - Medium - January 31, 2024

A vulnerability was found in OpenSC where PKCS#1 encryption padding removal is not implemented as side-channel resistant. This issue may result in the potential leak of private data.

Side Channel Attack

A Cross-site request forgery vulnerability exists in ipa/session/login_password in all supported versions of IPA

CVE-2023-5455 6.5 - Medium - January 10, 2024

A Cross-site request forgery vulnerability exists in ipa/session/login_password in all supported versions of IPA. This flaw allows an attacker to trick the user into submitting a request that could perform actions as the user, resulting in a loss of confidentiality and system integrity. During community penetration testing it was found that for certain HTTP end-points FreeIPA does not ensure CSRF protection. Due to implementation details one cannot use this flaw for reflection of a cookie representing already logged-in user. An attacker would always have to go through a new authentication attempt.

Session Riding

A flaw was found in PostgreSQL

CVE-2023-5869 8.8 - High - December 10, 2023

A flaw was found in PostgreSQL that allows authenticated database users to execute arbitrary code through missing overflow checks during SQL array value modification. This issue exists due to an integer overflow during array modification where a remote user can trigger the overflow by providing specially crafted data. This enables the execution of arbitrary code on the target system, allowing users to write arbitrary bytes to memory and extensively read the server's memory.

Integer Overflow or Wraparound

A flaw was found in PostgreSQL involving the pg_cancel_backend role

CVE-2023-5870 4.4 - Medium - December 10, 2023

A flaw was found in PostgreSQL involving the pg_cancel_backend role that signals background workers, including the logical replication launcher, autovacuum workers, and the autovacuum launcher. Successful exploitation requires a non-core extension with a less-resilient background worker and would affect that specific background worker only. This issue may allow a remote high privileged user to launch a denial of service (DoS) attack.

A memory disclosure vulnerability was found in PostgreSQL

CVE-2023-5868 4.3 - Medium - December 10, 2023

A memory disclosure vulnerability was found in PostgreSQL that allows remote users to access sensitive information by exploiting certain aggregate function calls with 'unknown'-type arguments. Handling 'unknown'-type values from string literals without type designation can disclose bytes, potentially revealing notable and confidential information. This issue exists due to excessive data output in aggregate function calls, enabling remote users to read some portion of system memory.

An out-of-bounds read vulnerability was found in smbCalcSize in fs/smb/client/netmisc.c in the Linux Kernel

CVE-2023-6606 7.1 - High - December 08, 2023

An out-of-bounds read vulnerability was found in smbCalcSize in fs/smb/client/netmisc.c in the Linux Kernel. This issue could allow a local attacker to crash the system or leak internal kernel information.

Out-of-bounds Read

SQUID is vulnerable to HTTP request smuggling, caused by chunked decoder lenience

CVE-2023-46846 5.3 - Medium - November 03, 2023

SQUID is vulnerable to HTTP request smuggling, caused by chunked decoder lenience, allows a remote attacker to perform Request/Response smuggling past firewall and frontend security systems.

HTTP Request Smuggling

Squid is vulnerable to a Denial of Service, where a remote attacker

CVE-2023-46847 7.5 - High - November 03, 2023

Squid is vulnerable to a Denial of Service, where a remote attacker can perform buffer overflow attack by writing up to 2 MB of arbitrary data to heap memory when Squid is configured to accept HTTP Digest Authentication.

Classic Buffer Overflow

Squid is vulnerable to Denial of Service, where a remote attacker can perform DoS by sending ftp:// URLs in HTTP Request messages or constructing ftp:// URLs

CVE-2023-46848 7.5 - High - November 03, 2023

Squid is vulnerable to Denial of Service, where a remote attacker can perform DoS by sending ftp:// URLs in HTTP Request messages or constructing ftp:// URLs from FTP Native input.

Incorrect Conversion between Numeric Types

A vulnerability was found in insights-client

CVE-2023-3972 7.8 - High - November 01, 2023

A vulnerability was found in insights-client. This security issue occurs because of insecure file operations or unsafe handling of temporary files and directories that lead to local privilege escalation. Before the insights-client has been registered on the system by root, an unprivileged local user or attacker could create the /var/tmp/insights-client directory (owning the directory with read, write, and execute permissions) on the system. After the insights-client is registered by root, an attacker could then control the directory content that insights are using by putting malicious scripts into it and executing arbitrary code as root (trivially bypassing SELinux protections because insights processes are allowed to disable SELinux system-wide).

Exposure of Resource to Wrong Sphere

The reference count changes made as part of the CVE-2023-33951 and CVE-2023-33952 fixes exposed a use-after-free flaw in the way memory objects were handled when they were being used to store a surface

CVE-2023-5633 7.8 - High - October 23, 2023

The reference count changes made as part of the CVE-2023-33951 and CVE-2023-33952 fixes exposed a use-after-free flaw in the way memory objects were handled when they were being used to store a surface. When running inside a VMware guest with 3D acceleration enabled, a local, unprivileged user could potentially use this flaw to escalate their privileges.

Dangling pointer

A buffer overflow was discovered in the GNU C Library's dynamic loader ld.so while processing the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable

CVE-2023-4911 7.8 - High - October 03, 2023

A buffer overflow was discovered in the GNU C Library's dynamic loader ld.so while processing the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable. This issue could allow a local attacker to use maliciously crafted GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variables when launching binaries with SUID permission to execute code with elevated privileges.

Memory Corruption

A vulnerability was found in MariaDB

CVE-2023-5157 7.5 - High - September 27, 2023

A vulnerability was found in MariaDB. An OpenVAS port scan on ports 3306 and 4567 allows a malicious remote client to cause a denial of service.

A flaw was found in glibc

CVE-2023-4527 6.5 - Medium - September 18, 2023

A flaw was found in glibc. When the getaddrinfo function is called with the AF_UNSPEC address family and the system is configured with no-aaaa mode via /etc/resolv.conf, a DNS response via TCP larger than 2048 bytes can potentially disclose stack contents through the function returned address data, and may cause a crash.

Out-of-bounds Read

A flaw was found in glibc

CVE-2023-4806 5.9 - Medium - September 18, 2023

A flaw was found in glibc. In an extremely rare situation, the getaddrinfo function may access memory that has been freed, resulting in an application crash. This issue is only exploitable when a NSS module implements only the _nss_*_gethostbyname2_r and _nss_*_getcanonname_r hooks without implementing the _nss_*_gethostbyname3_r hook. The resolved name should return a large number of IPv6 and IPv4, and the call to the getaddrinfo function should have the AF_INET6 address family with AI_CANONNAME, AI_ALL and AI_V4MAPPED as flags.

Dangling pointer

A flaw was found in glibc

CVE-2023-4813 5.9 - Medium - September 12, 2023

A flaw was found in glibc. In an uncommon situation, the gaih_inet function may use memory that has been freed, resulting in an application crash. This issue is only exploitable when the getaddrinfo function is called and the hosts database in /etc/nsswitch.conf is configured with SUCCESS=continue or SUCCESS=merge.

Dangling pointer

A flaw was found in the Keylime registrar that could allow a bypass of the challenge-response protocol during agent registration

CVE-2023-38201 6.5 - Medium - August 25, 2023

A flaw was found in the Keylime registrar that could allow a bypass of the challenge-response protocol during agent registration. This issue may allow an attacker to impersonate an agent and hide the true status of a monitored machine if the fake agent is added to the verifier list by a legitimate user, resulting in a breach of the integrity of the registrar database.

A vulnerability was found in subscription-manager that allows local privilege escalation due to inadequate authorization

CVE-2023-3899 7.8 - High - August 23, 2023

A vulnerability was found in subscription-manager that allows local privilege escalation due to inadequate authorization. The D-Bus interface com.redhat.RHSM1 exposes a significant number of methods to all users that could change the state of the registration. By using the com.redhat.RHSM1.Config.SetAll() method, a low-privileged local user could tamper with the state of the registration, by unregistering the system or by changing the current entitlements. This flaw allows an attacker to set arbitrary configuration directives for /etc/rhsm/rhsm.conf, which can be abused to cause a local privilege escalation to an unconfined root.

AuthZ

A use-after-free flaw was found in the Linux kernels Netfilter functionality when adding a rule with NFTA_RULE_CHAIN_ID

CVE-2023-4147 7.8 - High - August 07, 2023

A use-after-free flaw was found in the Linux kernels Netfilter functionality when adding a rule with NFTA_RULE_CHAIN_ID. This flaw allows a local user to crash or escalate their privileges on the system.

Dangling pointer

A flaw was found in Keylime

CVE-2023-38200 7.5 - High - July 24, 2023

A flaw was found in Keylime. Due to their blocking nature, the Keylime registrar is subject to a remote denial of service against its SSL connections. This flaw allows an attacker to exhaust all available connections.

Excessive Iteration

A vulnerability was found in the libreswan library

CVE-2023-2295 7.5 - High - May 17, 2023

A vulnerability was found in the libreswan library. This security issue occurs when an IKEv1 Aggressive Mode packet is received with only unacceptable crypto algorithms, and the response packet is not sent with a zero responder SPI. When a subsequent packet is received where the sender reuses the libreswan responder SPI as its own initiator SPI, the pluto daemon state machine crashes. No remote code execution is possible. This CVE exists because of a CVE-2023-30570 security regression for libreswan package in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2.

A flaw was found in the WebKitGTK package

CVE-2023-2203 8.8 - High - May 17, 2023

A flaw was found in the WebKitGTK package. An improper input validation issue may lead to a use-after-free vulnerability. This flaw allows attackers with network access to pass specially crafted web content files, causing a denial of service or arbitrary code execution. This CVE exists because of a CVE-2023-28205 security regression for the WebKitGTK package in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2.

Dangling pointer

A flaw was found in the Emacs text editor

CVE-2023-2491 7.8 - High - May 17, 2023

A flaw was found in the Emacs text editor. Processing a specially crafted org-mode code with the "org-babel-execute:latex" function in ob-latex.el can result in arbitrary command execution. This CVE exists because of a CVE-2023-28617 security regression for the emacs package in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2.

Command Injection

A vulnerability was found in X.Org

CVE-2023-0494 7.8 - High - March 27, 2023

A vulnerability was found in X.Org. This issue occurs due to a dangling pointer in DeepCopyPointerClasses that can be exploited by ProcXkbSetDeviceInfo() and ProcXkbGetDeviceInfo() to read and write into freed memory. This can lead to local privilege elevation on systems where the X server runs privileged and remote code execution for ssh X forwarding sessions.

Dangling pointer

A vulnerability was found in WebKit

CVE-2019-8720 8.8 - High - March 06, 2023

A vulnerability was found in WebKit. The flaw is triggered when processing maliciously crafted web content that may lead to arbitrary code execution. Improved memory handling addresses the multiple memory corruption issues.

Buffer Overflow

sssd: libsss_certmap fails to sanitise certificate data used in LDAP filters

CVE-2022-4254 8.8 - High - February 01, 2023

sssd: libsss_certmap fails to sanitise certificate data used in LDAP filters

A buffer overflow was found in grub_font_construct_glyph()

CVE-2022-2601 8.6 - High - December 14, 2022

A buffer overflow was found in grub_font_construct_glyph(). A malicious crafted pf2 font can lead to an overflow when calculating the max_glyph_size value, allocating a smaller than needed buffer for the glyph, this further leads to a buffer overflow and a heap based out-of-bounds write. An attacker may use this vulnerability to circumvent the secure boot mechanism.

Heap-based Buffer Overflow

Qemu before 2.0 block driver for Hyper-V VHDX Images is vulnerable to infinite loops and other potential issues when calculating BAT entries

CVE-2014-0148 5.5 - Medium - September 29, 2022

Qemu before 2.0 block driver for Hyper-V VHDX Images is vulnerable to infinite loops and other potential issues when calculating BAT entries, due to missing bounds checks for block_size and logical_sector_size variables. These are used to derive other fields like 'sectors_per_block' etc. A user able to alter the Qemu disk image could ise this flaw to crash the Qemu instance resulting in DoS.

Infinite Loop

QEMU before 2.0.0 block drivers for CLOOP, QCOW2 version 2 and various other image formats are vulnerable to potential memory corruptions, integer/buffer overflows or crash caused by missing input validations which could

CVE-2014-0144 8.6 - High - September 29, 2022

QEMU before 2.0.0 block drivers for CLOOP, QCOW2 version 2 and various other image formats are vulnerable to potential memory corruptions, integer/buffer overflows or crash caused by missing input validations which could allow a remote user to execute arbitrary code on the host with the privileges of the QEMU process.

Improper Input Validation

Qemu before 1.6.2 block diver for the various disk image formats used by Bochs and for the QCOW version 2 format, are vulnerable to a possible crash caused by signed data types or a logic error while creating QCOW2 snapshots

CVE-2014-0147 6.2 - Medium - September 29, 2022

Qemu before 1.6.2 block diver for the various disk image formats used by Bochs and for the QCOW version 2 format, are vulnerable to a possible crash caused by signed data types or a logic error while creating QCOW2 snapshots, which leads to incorrectly calling update_refcount() routine.

Integer Overflow or Wraparound

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel

CVE-2021-3669 5.5 - Medium - August 26, 2022

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel. Measuring usage of the shared memory does not scale with large shared memory segment counts which could lead to resource exhaustion and DoS.

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

An improper link resolution flaw while extracting an archive can lead to changing the access control list (ACL) of the target of the link

CVE-2021-23177 7.8 - High - August 23, 2022

An improper link resolution flaw while extracting an archive can lead to changing the access control list (ACL) of the target of the link. An attacker may provide a malicious archive to a victim user, who would trigger this flaw when trying to extract the archive. A local attacker may use this flaw to change the ACL of a file on the system and gain more privileges.

insecure temporary file

An improper link resolution flaw

CVE-2021-31566 7.8 - High - August 23, 2022

An improper link resolution flaw can occur while extracting an archive leading to changing modes, times, access control lists, and flags of a file outside of the archive. An attacker may provide a malicious archive to a victim user, who would trigger this flaw when trying to extract the archive. A local attacker may use this flaw to gain more privileges in a system.

insecure temporary file

A NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in the Linux kernels IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networking subsystem in the way the user closes the LR-WPAN connection

CVE-2021-3659 5.5 - Medium - August 22, 2022

A NULL pointer dereference flaw was found in the Linux kernels IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networking subsystem in the way the user closes the LR-WPAN connection. This flaw allows a local user to crash the system. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to system availability.

NULL Pointer Dereference

A crafted 16-bit grayscale PNG image may lead to a out-of-bounds write in the heap area

CVE-2021-3695 4.5 - Medium - July 06, 2022

A crafted 16-bit grayscale PNG image may lead to a out-of-bounds write in the heap area. An attacker may take advantage of that to cause heap data corruption or eventually arbitrary code execution and circumvent secure boot protections. This issue has a high complexity to be exploited as an attacker needs to perform some triage over the heap layout to achieve signifcant results, also the values written into the memory are repeated three times in a row making difficult to produce valid payloads. This flaw affects grub2 versions prior grub-2.12.

Memory Corruption

A heap out-of-bounds write may heppen during the handling of Huffman tables in the PNG reader

CVE-2021-3696 4.5 - Medium - July 06, 2022

A heap out-of-bounds write may heppen during the handling of Huffman tables in the PNG reader. This may lead to data corruption in the heap space. Confidentiality, Integrity and Availablity impact may be considered Low as it's very complex to an attacker control the encoding and positioning of corrupted Huffman entries to achieve results such as arbitrary code execution and/or secure boot circumvention. This flaw affects grub2 versions prior grub-2.12.

Memory Corruption

A crafted JPEG image may lead the JPEG reader to underflow its data pointer, allowing user-controlled data to be written in heap

CVE-2021-3697 7 - High - July 06, 2022

A crafted JPEG image may lead the JPEG reader to underflow its data pointer, allowing user-controlled data to be written in heap. To a successful to be performed the attacker needs to perform some triage over the heap layout and craft an image with a malicious format and payload. This vulnerability can lead to data corruption and eventual code execution or secure boot circumvention. This flaw affects grub2 versions prior grub-2.12.

Memory Corruption

A privilege escalation flaw was found in Podman

CVE-2022-1227 8.8 - High - April 29, 2022

A privilege escalation flaw was found in Podman. This flaw allows an attacker to publish a malicious image to a public registry. Once this image is downloaded by a potential victim, the vulnerability is triggered after a user runs the 'podman top' command. This action gives the attacker access to the host filesystem, leading to information disclosure or denial of service.

Improper Privilege Management

A flaw was found in Podman, where containers were started incorrectly with non-empty default permissions

CVE-2022-27649 7.5 - High - April 04, 2022

A flaw was found in Podman, where containers were started incorrectly with non-empty default permissions. A vulnerability was found in Moby (Docker Engine), where containers were started incorrectly with non-empty inheritable Linux process capabilities. This flaw allows an attacker with access to programs with inheritable file capabilities to elevate those capabilities to the permitted set when execve(2) runs.

Incorrect Default Permissions

A random memory access flaw was found in the Linux kernel's GPU i915 kernel driver functionality in the way a user may run malicious code on the GPU

CVE-2022-0330 7.8 - High - March 25, 2022

A random memory access flaw was found in the Linux kernel's GPU i915 kernel driver functionality in the way a user may run malicious code on the GPU. This flaw allows a local user to crash the system or escalate their privileges on the system.

Improper Preservation of Permissions

A stack overflow flaw was found in the Linux kernel's TIPC protocol functionality in the way a user sends a packet with malicious content where the number of domain member nodes is higher than the 64

CVE-2022-0435 8.8 - High - March 25, 2022

A stack overflow flaw was found in the Linux kernel's TIPC protocol functionality in the way a user sends a packet with malicious content where the number of domain member nodes is higher than the 64 allowed. This flaw allows a remote user to crash the system or possibly escalate their privileges if they have access to the TIPC network.

Memory Corruption

A use-after-free flaw was found in the Linux kernels FUSE filesystem in the way a user triggers write()