[UNIX] Potential Insecurities with Ethereal

From: support@securiteam.com
Date: 05/29/02 

From: support@securiteam.com
To: list@securiteam.com
Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 19:32:46 +0200 (CEST)

The following security advisory is sent to the securiteam mailing list, and can be found at the SecuriTeam web site: http://www.securiteam.com
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  Potential Insecurities with Ethereal
------------------------------------------------------------------------

SUMMARY

Several insecurities have been found in Ethereal, these insecurities would
allow a remote attacker to cause anything from a denial of service attack,
to a buffer overflow, causing the execution of arbitrary code.

DETAILS

Vulnerable systems:
 * Ethereal version 0.9.3

Immune systems:
 * Ethereal version 0.9.4

Four potential security issues have been discovered in Ethereal 0.9.3:
 * The SMB dissector could potentially dereference a NULL pointer in two
cases.
 * The X11 dissector could potentially overflow a buffer while parsing
keysyms.
 * The DNS dissector could go into an infinite loop while reading a
malformed packet.
 * The GIOP dissector could potentially allocate large amounts of memory.

Currently no known exploits exist "in the wild" for any of these issues.
Versions prior to 0.9.3 are also subject to these bugs. In order to
determine which version of Ethereal you have installed, do one of the
following:
Load Ethereal and go to the Help->About Ethereal... menu item.

From the command line run
ethereal -v
or
tethereal -v
(the "v" is lowercase").

Either action will display the application version along with the
libraries that Ethereal and Tethereal are linked with. If version "0.9.3"
or prior is displayed, the application is susceptible.

Impact:
It may be possible to make Ethereal crash or hang by injecting a
purposefully malformed packet onto the wire, or by convincing someone to
read a malformed packet trace file. It may be possible to make Ethereal
run arbitrary code by exploiting the buffer and pointer problems.

Resolution:
Upgrade to 0.9.4.

Workaround:
If you are running a version prior to 0.9.4, you can disable the
dissectors for each of these protocols by selecting Edit->Protocols... and
deselecting them from the list.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The information has been provided by <mailto:je@sekure.net> Jonas
Eriksson.

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