Ethereal DCE RPC dissector vulnerable to DoS

Overview

A vulnerability in Ethereal may allow a remote attacker to cause a denial of service.

Description

The Ethereal web site describes Ethereal as “a free network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows. It allows you to examine data from a live network or from a capture file on disk. You can interactively browse the capture data, viewing summary and detail information for each packet. Ethereal has several powerful features, including a rich display filter language and the ability to view the reconstructed stream of a TCP session.”

Ethereal includes the ability to examine packets containing DCE RPC data (DCE RPC is “a facility for calling a procedure on a remote machine as if it were a local procedure call”). The vulnerability exists in the way Ethereal’s DCE RPC dissector allocates memory. For more information, please see Ethereal’s announcement.

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Impact

A remote attacker may be able to consume excessive amounts of memory, and potentially crash Ethereal.

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Solution

Upgrade to Ethereal version 0.9.13.

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Vendor Information

542540

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Ethereal __ Affected

Updated: June 12, 2003

Status

Affected

Vendor Statement

See <http://www.ethereal.com/appnotes/enpa-sa-00010.html&gt;.

Vendor Information

The vendor has not provided us with any further information regarding this vulnerability.

Addendum

The CERT/CC has no additional comments at this time.

If you have feedback, comments, or additional information about this vulnerability, please send us [email](<mailto:[email protected]?Subject=VU%23542540 Feedback>).

CVSS Metrics

Group	Score	Vector
Base
Temporal
Environmental

References

• <http://rsusu1.rnd.runnet.ru/alpha/progtool/dce31unx/overview/Dceint63.htm&gt;
• <http://www.ethereal.com/appnotes/enpa-sa-00010.html&gt;
• <http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9007/&gt;
• <http://www.ethereal.com/&gt;

Acknowledgements

The CERT/CC thanks Ethereal for publishing enpa-sa-00010, upon which this document is based.

This document was written by Ian A Finlay.

Other Information

CVE IDs:	CVE-2003-0428
Severity Metric:	7.50 Date Public: