Ethereal: Multiple security problems

Background

Ethereal is a feature rich network protocol analyzer.

Description

There are multiple vulnerabilities in versions of Ethereal earlier than 0.10.4, including:

• A buffer overflow in the MMSE dissector.
• Under specific conditions a SIP packet could make Ethereal crash.
• The AIM dissector could throw an assertion, causing Ethereal to crash.
• The SPNEGO dissector could dereference a null pointer, causing a 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. However, it is strongly recommended to upgrade to the latest stable release.

Resolution

All Ethereal users should upgrade to the latest stable version:

 # emerge sync
 
 # emerge -pv ">=net-analyzer/ethereal-0.10.4"
 # emerge ">=net-analyzer/ethereal-0.10.4"