Followup to MetaInfo vulnerabilities

From: Jeff Forristal (jeffat_private)
Date: Fri Jul 03 1998 - 08:08:08 PDT

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    Shortly after releasing the public bugtraq post, I was contacted by
    MetaInfo regarding the problem and was told that they had just put a patch
    online, available, with instructions, at www.metainfo.com/download.
    
    While this patch corrected the problem of transversal into higher levels
    of the filesystem, it was still open to another kind of DoS attack. If an
    attacker was to send a GET request to MetaWeb server that contained around
    8K of characters, the MetaWeb server process would spike to 100% CPU
    utilization, and stay there indefinately.
    
    Example:
    
    http://mail.server.com:5000/index.htm? 8K of characters here>
    
    This would put the server in an unstable state; now, a regular request
    will cause to to spike and hang:
    
    http://mail.server.com:5000/
    
    MetaInfo was contacted about this problem as well; they released a patch
    to fix this problem. You can download a copy from www.forristech.com, or
    check to see if it's available on MetaInfo's site yet.
    
    -Jeff Forristal
    



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