Ethereal: Multiple vulnerabilities

Security Team Contact Address

Updated January 20, 2005

1. Gentoo Linux Security Advisory

Advisory Reference	GLSA 200501-27 / ethereal
Release Date	January 20, 2005
Latest Revision	January 20, 2005: 01
Impact	high
Exploitable	remote

Package	Vulnerable versions	Unaffected versions	Architecture(s)
net-analyzer/ethereal	< 0.10.9	>= 0.10.9	All supported architectures

Related bugreports: #78559

Synopsis

Multiple vulnerabilities exist in Ethereal, which may allow an attacker to run arbitrary code, crash the program or perform DoS by CPU and disk utilization.

2. Impact Information

Background

Ethereal is a feature rich network protocol analyzer.

Description

There are multiple vulnerabilities in versions of Ethereal earlier than 0.10.9, including:

The COPS dissector could go into an infinite loop (CAN-2005-0006).
The DLSw dissector could cause an assertion, making Ethereal exit prematurely (CAN-2005-0007).
The DNP dissector could cause memory corruption (CAN-2005-0008).
The Gnutella dissector could cause an assertion, making Ethereal exit prematurely (CAN-2005-0009).
The MMSE dissector could free statically-allocated memory (CAN-2005-0010).
The X11 dissector is vulnerable to a string buffer overflow (CAN-2005-0084).

Impact

An attacker might be able to use these vulnerabilities to crash Ethereal, perform DoS by CPU and disk space utilization 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. However, it is strongly recommended to upgrade to the latest stable version.

Resolution

All Ethereal users should upgrade to the latest version:

Code Listing 3.1: Resolution

# emerge --sync
# emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=net-analyzer/ethereal-0.10.9"

4. References