Ethereal: Multiple vulnerabilities

Security Team Contact Address

Updated March 12, 2005

1. Gentoo Linux Security Advisory

Advisory Reference	GLSA 200503-16 / ethereal
Release Date	March 12, 2005
Latest Revision	May 22, 2006: 03
Impact	high
Exploitable	remote

Package	Vulnerable versions	Unaffected versions	Architecture(s)
net-analyzer/ethereal	< 0.10.10	>= 0.10.10	All supported architectures

Related bugreports: #84547

Synopsis

Multiple vulnerabilities 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 0.10.10, including:

The Etheric, 3GPP2 A11 and IAPP dissectors are vulnerable to buffer overflows (CAN-2005-0704, CAN-2005-0699 and CAN-2005-0739).
The GPRS-LLC could crash when the "ignore cipher bit" option is enabled (CAN-2005-0705).
Various vulnerabilities in JXTA and sFlow dissectors.

Impact

An attacker might be able to use these vulnerabilities to crash Ethereal and 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. However, it is strongly recommended that you 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-0.10.10"

4. References