For most people the PowerPoint error is the most important, but for those who use VMWare, the large number of important vulnerabilities puts a great dent in their confidence in the safety of this popular platform. Alan
@RISK is the SANS community's consensus bulletin summarizing the most important vulnerabilities and exploits identified during the past week and providing guidance on appropriate actions to protect your systems (PART I). It also includes a comprehensive list of all new vulnerabilities discovered in the past week (PART II).
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Part I for this issue has been compiled by Rohan Kotian at TippingPoint, a division of 3Com, as a by-product of that company's continuous effort to ensure that its intrusion prevention products effectively block exploits using known vulnerabilities. TippingPoint's analysis is complemented by input from a council of security managers from twelve large organizations who confidentially share with SANS the specific actions they have taken to protect their systems. A detailed description of the process may be found at http://www.sans.org/newsletters/cva/#process
Description: Microsoft Office PowerPoint, a presentation program from Microsoft, has a remote code execution vulnerability. A specially crafted malicious PowerPoint file can be used to trigger this vulnerability. While parsing such a file, an error, which is yet unspecified, is caused when PowerPoint accesses an invalid object in memory. This can be used by attackers to execute arbitrary code in the context of the logged-on user. There are no other technical details about this vulnerability and no updates from the vendor as yet. A couple of workarounds suggested are 1) Use Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment (MOICE) while opening files from untrusted sources. 2) Use the Microsoft File Block Policy to block the opening of Office 2003 documents from unknown sources. 3) Don't open Office documents from unknown or untrusted sources.
Status: Vendor confirmed, no updates available.
Description: VMWare, a virtualization software available for a variety of platforms, has multiple vulnerabilities. The first issue is a vulnerability in the guest virtual device driver which can be used to crash the host or any other virtual machines on the host. The second issue is a vulnerability in ioctl in hcmon.sys which could be used to crash a Windows-based host. A privileged Windows account is required to exploit this issue. The third issue is a privilege escalation vulnerability on Windows-based systems caused by an error in Virtual Machine Communication Interface (vmci.sys). The fourth issue is two heap overflow vulnerabilities in VMWare VMnc Codec, which can be used by attackers to execute arbitrary code. The attacker has to entice the victim to either open a malicious video file or visit a malicious web page. The fifth issue is an error in the ACE shared folders which could allow a non ACE administrator to enable a previously disabled and not removed shared folder in the guest. The sixth issue is an error in vmware-authd.exe which could lead to a denial-of-service condition on a Windows-based hosts. The seventh issue is a vulnerability in VI Client, as a result of which the password for VirtualCenter Server might be present in the memory of the VI Client, after logging in to VirtualCenter Server with VI Client.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: Novell NetIdentity agent provides a secure identity wallet by giving background authentication to Windows Web based applications that require eDirectory authentication. A vulnerability has been identified in Novell NetIdentity Agent while handling certain RPC messages. The specific error is within the "xtagent.exe" when handling RPC messages over the "XTIERRPCPIPE" named pipe. This error can then allow an attacker to dereference an arbitrary pointer. A valid IPC$ connection needs to be established in order to exploit this vulnerability. Successful exploitation can lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the system user.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: Ghostscript is an open source parsing and display engine for the Portable Document Format (PDF) and PostScript (PS) file formats. It is the default PS and PDF viewer for a variety of Linux distributions and forms the basis of other PS and PDF viewers. It has a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability which could be triggered while processing a specially crafted PDF file. The specific error is in the "jbig2_decode_symbol_dict()" function in the jbig2dec library while decoding JBIG2 symbol dictionary segments. Successful exploitation may lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the user using the vulnerable application. An attacker will have to trick the victim to either visit the website with the malicious PDF file or open the file sent as an email attachment.
Status: Vendor not confirmed, no updates available.
Description: Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) is a popular open source antivirus system. Multiple vulnerabilities have been identified in ClamAV while handling specially crafted malformed files or URI's. There is a buffer overflow error in the "cli_url_canon()" libclamav/phishcheck.c. This could be exploited by an attacker via specially crafted URL's to cause a buffer overflow. There is also an error while parsing malformed files packed with UPack. This could be exploited by an attacker to cause denial-of-service condition. Technical details are available through source code analysis.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: IrfanView is a lightweight freeware viewer/player for Microsoft Windows and is known for its speed and ease of use. IrfanView's Format plug-in has an integer overflow vulnerability. A specially crafted X PixMap (XPM) file can be used to trigger this vulnerability. The error is caused due to an integer overflow while processing XPM files with certain dimensions which can be leveraged by an attacker to cause a heap -based buffer overflow and execute arbitrary code in the context of the vulnerable application or just crash the application. An attacker will have to trick the victim to either visit the website with the malicious XPM file or open the file sent as an email attachment.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
Description: Xine is a multimedia player for Unix-like operating systems that can play CDs, VCDs or DVDs and is built around a shared library (xine-lib). There is an integer overflow vulnerability in the Xine-lib that can be triggered by a specially crafted QuickTime movie file. The specific error is in the "qt_error parse_trak_atom()" function while parsing QuickTime movie files with STTS atoms. Successful exploitation can lead to arbitrary code execution in the user running the application with the affected library. A malicious QuickTime file posted on a website or attached to an email may be the likely vectors used by the attackers. Technical details about the vulnerability are publicly available.
Status: Vendor confirmed, updates available.
This list is compiled by Qualys ( www.qualys.com ) as part of that company's ongoing effort to ensure its vulnerability management web service tests for all known vulnerabilities that can be scanned. As of this week Qualys scans for 6869 unique vulnerabilities. For this special SANS community listing, Qualys also includes vulnerabilities that cannot be scanned remotely.
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