Name: Potential issues with Ethereal 0.9.4

Docid: enpa-sa-00005

Date: June 28, 2002

Versions affected: 0.9.4 and earlier

Severity: High

Description:

Several potential security issues have been discovered in Ethereal 0.9.4:

• The BGP dissector is vulnerable to a buffer overflow.

• The WCP (Wellfleet Compression Protocol) dissector is is vulnerable to buffer overflows in large (> 2048 byte) frames.

• The SOCKS, RSVP, AFS and LMP dissectors are susceptible to core dumps.

Versions prior to 0.9.4 are also affected by many of these bugs. In order to determine which version of Ethereal you have installed, do one of the following:

• Load Ethereal and go to the Help->About Ethereal... menu item.

• From the command line run

  ethereal -v

  or

  tethereal -v

  (the "v" is lowercase").

Impact:

It may be possible to make Ethereal crash or hang by injecting a purposefully malformed packet onto the wire, or by convincing someone to read a malformed packet trace file. It may be possible to make Ethereal run arbitrary code by exploiting buffer overlfow and pointer problems.

Resolution:

Upgrade to 0.9.5.

If you are running a version prior to 0.9.5, you can disable the dissectors for each of these protocols by selecting Edit->Protocols... and deselecting them from the list. These preferences are not saved; this must be done each time you run Ethereal.