Ethereal: Multiple vulnerabilities

Background

Ethereal is a feature rich network protocol analyzer.

Description

There are multiple vulnerabilities in versions of Ethereal earlier than 0.10.9, including:

• The COPS dissector could go into an infinite loop (CAN-2005-0006).
• The DLSw dissector could cause an assertion, making Ethereal exit prematurely (CAN-2005-0007).
• The DNP dissector could cause memory corruption (CAN-2005-0008).
• The Gnutella dissector could cause an assertion, making Ethereal exit prematurely (CAN-2005-0009).
• The MMSE dissector could free statically-allocated memory (CAN-2005-0010).
• The X11 dissector is vulnerable to a string buffer overflow (CAN-2005-0084).

Impact

An attacker might be able to use these vulnerabilities to crash Ethereal, perform DoS by CPU and disk space utilization 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 version.

Resolution

All Ethereal users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=net-analyzer/ethereal-0.10.9"