Summary
The remote host is missing an update to cyrus-sasl2, cyrus-sasl2-heimdal announced via advisory DSA 1807-1.
Solution
https://secure1.securityspace.com/smysecure/catid.html?in=DSA%201807-1
Insight
James Ralston discovered that the sasl_encode64() function of cyrus-sasl2, a free library implementing the Simple Authentication and Security Layer, suffers from a missing null termination in certain situations. This causes several buffer overflows in situations where cyrus-sasl2 itself requires the string to be null terminated which can lead to denial of service or arbitrary code execution.
Important notice (Quoting from US-CERT):
While this patch will fix currently vulnerable code, it can cause non-vulnerable existing code to break. Here's a function prototype from include/saslutil.h to clarify my explanation:
/* base64 encode
* in -- input data
* inlen -- input data length
* out -- output buffer (will be NUL terminated)
* outmax -- max size of output buffer
* result:
* outlen -- gets actual length of output buffer (optional) *
* Returns SASL_OK on success, SASL_BUFOVER if result won't fit */
LIBSASL_API int sasl_encode64(const char *in, unsigned inlen, char *out, unsigned outmax,
unsigned *outlen)
Assume a scenario where calling code has been written in such a way that it calculates the exact size required for base64 encoding in advance, then allocates a buffer of that exact size, passing a pointer to the buffer into sasl_encode64() as *out. As long as this code does not anticipate that the buffer is NUL-terminated (does not call any string-handling functions like strlen(), for example) the code will work and it will not be vulnerable.
Once this patch is applied, that same code will break because sasl_encode64() will begin to return SASL_BUFOVER.
For the oldstable distribution (etch), this problem will be fixed soon.
For the stable distribution (lenny), this problem has been fixed in version 2.1.22.dfsg1-23+lenny1 of cyrus-sasl2 and cyrus-sasl2-heimdal.
For the testing distribution (squeeze), this problem will be fixed soon.
For the unstable distribution (sid), this problem has been fixed in version 2.1.23.dfsg1-1 of cyrus-sasl2 and cyrus-sasl2-heimdal.
We recommend that you upgrade your cyrus-sasl2/cyrus-sasl2-heimdal packages.
Severity
Classification
-
CVE CVE-2009-0688 -
CVSS Base Score: 7.5
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
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