[ GLSA 200407-08 ] Ethereal: Multiple security problems

[GLSA]

Gentoo Linux Security Advisory

Title: Ethereal: Multiple security problems (GLSA 200407-08)
Severity: high
Exploitable: remote
Date: July 09, 2004
Updated: May 22, 2006
Bug(s): #56423
ID: 200407-08

Synopsis

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

Background

Ethereal is a feature rich network protocol analyzer.

Affected Packages

Package: net-analyzer/ethereal
Vulnerable: <= 0.10.4
Unaffected: >= 0.10.5
Architectures: All supported architectures


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.

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: