This is a placeholder bug for the second flaw in bug 16618. From cve-assign in <http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/02/04/1>: “ Here, it seems that the goal of the policy is risk management for use of alloca. This is security relevant for some applications that use glibc, because it could (for example) allow a denial of service attack that's intended to trigger a failed alloca. There was one intended policy, and the the incorrect "__libc_use_alloca (newsize)" caused a different (and weaker) policy to be enforced instead. Use CVE-2015-1473 for this risk-management error. ”
Fixed in 2.21, as part of commit 5bd80bfe9ca0d955bfbbc002781bc7b01b6bcb06. Tracked in bug 16618, this is just a placeholder for the CVE-2015-1473 alias. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 16618 ***