Potential security issues in Ethereal

From: Jonas Eriksson (jeat_private)
Date: Wed May 29 2002 - 07:54:35 PDT

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    Looks like Ethereal has some potential security issues:
    http://www.ethereal.com/appnotes/enpa-sa-00004.html
    
    --
    
    Name: Potential issues with Ethereal 0.9.3
    Docid: enpa-sa-00004
    Date: May 19, 2002
    Severity: High
    
    
    Description:
    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.
    
    No known exploits exist "in the wild" at the present time 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 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.
    
    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.
    
    
    --
    Regards
    Jonas Eriksson
    jeat_private
    



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