Ethereal: Multiple vulnerabilities — GLSA 200501-27

Multiple vulnerabilities exist in Ethereal, which may allow an attacker to run arbitrary code, crash the program or perform DoS by CPU and disk utilization.

Affected packages

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

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

References

• CAN-2005-0006
• CAN-2005-0007
• CAN-2005-0008
• CAN-2005-0009
• CAN-2005-0010
• CAN-2005-0084
• Ethereal Release Notes

Release date
January 20, 2005

Latest revision
January 20, 2005: 01

Severity
high

Exploitable
remote

Bugzilla entries

• 78559