EEYE: Sun(TM) ONE / iPlanet Web Server 4.1 and 6.0 Remote Buffer Overflow

From: Marc Maiffret (marcat_private)
Date: Thu Aug 08 2002 - 17:26:23 PDT

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    Sun(TM) ONE / iPlanet Web Server 4.1 and 6.0 Remote Buffer Overflow
    
    Release Date: August 8, 2002
    
    Severity:
    High (Remote SYSTEM/ROOT)
    
    Systems Affected:
    iPlanet 6.0 and prior
    
    Description:
    A vulnerability in transfer chunking can be exploited to remotely execute
    code of an attacker's choice on a vulnerable machine. By sending a carefully
    crafted session, an attacker can overwrite a section of the heap. Various
    data structures in the overwritten heap can be manipulated to move attacker
    supplied data to attacker supplied memory addresses, thereby altering the
    flow of execution into an attacker supplied payload.
    
    Note this variant is not the integer overflow affecting IIS and Apache that
    was discovered during regression testing with Microsoft. This is another
    variant relating to incorrect size calculation.
    
    The following example will show the vulnerable condition:
    
    **************Begin Session****************
    POST /EEYE.html HTTP/1.1
    Host: www.EEYE2002.com
    Transfer-Encoding: chunked
    Content-Length: 22
    
    4
    EEYE
    7FFFFFFF
    [DATA]
    **************End Session******************
    
    [DATA] will overwrite heap memory. Increase or decrease depending on
    implementation.
    
    Technical Description:
    The example session above overwrites a section of the heap that contains
    data structures related to the Memory management system. By manipulating the
    content of these structures, we can overwrite an arbitrary 4 bytes of memory
    with an attacker supplied address.
    
    It is widely assumed that the risk for these type of vulnerabilities is
    fairly low due to the fact that addressing is dynamic and that you must use
    brute force in your attack; however, this is false assumption and
    exploitation can be successful with one attempt, across dll versions. An
    attacker can overwrite static global variables, stored function pointers,
    process management structures, memory management structures, or any number
    of data types that will allow him to gain control of the target application
    in one session.
    
    Vendor Status:
    Sun has released a security bulletin and patch:
    http://www.sun.com/service/support/software/iplanet/alerts/transferencodinga
    lert-23july2002.html
    
    Credit: Riley Hassell
    
    Greetings:
    Eli, Kasia, Halvar, FX, and the three amigos K2, Dark Spyrit, and Joey.
    
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    eEye Digital Security
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    infoat_private
    



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