Apple Mac OS X bootpd vulnerable to stack-based buffer overflow

Overview

A buffer overflow vulnerability in the Apple Mac OS X bootp daemon may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on an affected system.

Description

bootpd

The bootp daemon (bootpd) is used to send clients network and IP address configuration settings. It can also work in combination with a TFTP server to transfer an operating system image to diskless clients.

The Problem
There is a stack-based buffer overflow in bootpd's request processing. An attacker may be able to create a specially crafted bootp request, that when sent to the server running bootpd, would trigger the overflow.

Note that bootpd is not enabled by default on any supported version of Mac OS X.

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Impact

An attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the affected system.

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Solution

Upgrade
Apple has addressed this issue in Security Update 2006-004. Refer to Apple’s Security Update site for more information.

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Do not Enable bootpd
Do not enable bootpd unless you need the service to run. The command “ps -aux | grep” can be used to check if the bootpd process is running.

Restrict Access
Restrict access to the bootpd server to trusted hosts only. More details on configuring bootpd can be found in the Apple OS X Server System Image Administration Guide.

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Vendor Information

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Apple Computer, Inc. Unknown

Notified: August 02, 2006 Updated: August 02, 2006

Status

Unknown

Vendor Statement

We have not received a statement from the vendor.

Vendor Information

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

CVSS Metrics

Group	Score	Vector
Base
Temporal
Environmental

References

• <http://secunia.com/advisories/21253/&gt;
• <http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/MacOSXSrvr10.3_SystemImageAdmin.pdf&gt;
• <http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304063&gt;

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Apple Product Security for reporting this vulnerability.

This document was written by Ryan Giobbi.

Other Information

CVE IDs:	CVE-2006-3498
Severity Metric:	0.13 Date Public: