Ethereal: Multiple security problems

Security Team Contact Address

Updated July 09, 2004

1. Gentoo Linux Security Advisory

Advisory Reference	GLSA 200407-08 / Ethereal
Release Date	July 09, 2004
Latest Revision	May 22, 2006: 02
Impact	high
Exploitable	remote

Package	Vulnerable versions	Unaffected versions	Architecture(s)
net-analyzer/ethereal	<= 0.10.4	>= 0.10.5	All supported architectures

Related bugreports: #56423

Synopsis

Multiple vulnerabilities including one buffer overflow exist in Ethereal, which may allow an attacker to run arbitrary code or crash the program.

2. Impact Information

Background

Ethereal is a feature rich network protocol analyzer.

Description

There are multiple vulnerabilities in versions of Ethereal earlier than 0.10.5, including:

In some cases the iSNS dissector could cause Ethereal to abort.
If there was no policy name for a handle for SMB SID snooping it could cause a crash.
A malformed or missing community string could cause the SNMP dissector to crash.

Impact

An attacker could use these vulnerabilities to crash Ethereal or even execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running Ethereal, which could be the root user.

3. Resolution Information

Workaround

For a temporary workaround you can disable all affected protocol dissectors by selecting Analyze->Enabled Protocols... and deselecting them from the list. For SMB you can disable SID snooping in the SMB protocol preference. However, it is strongly recommended to upgrade to the latest stable version.

Resolution

All Ethereal users should upgrade to the latest stable version:

Code Listing 3.1: Resolution

# emerge sync

# emerge -pv ">=net-analyzer/ethereal-0.10.5"
# emerge ">=net-analyzer/ethereal-0.10.5"

4. References