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Exploitable pine heap overflow (Re: Remote pine Denial of Service)

From: 3APA3A <3APA3A(at)SECURITY.NNOV.RU>
Date: Sat Nov 09 2002 - 01:54:53 EST


Dear Linus Sjöberg,

There is a classic and probably exploitable heap overflow in bldaddr.c addr_list_string().

    else{

        char *charset = NULL;

        list = (char *)fs_get((size_t)est_size(adrlist));
        list[0] = '\0';
        rfc822_write_address_decode(list, adrlist,
                                    verbose ? NULL : &charset, do_quote);
        if(charset)
          fs_give((void **)&charset);

    }

est_size should calculate size of target string :

est_size(a)

    ADDRESS *a;
{

    int cnt = 0;

Do you need help?X

    for(; a; a = a->next){

        /* two times personal for possible quoting */
        cnt   += 2 * (a->personal  ? strlen(a->personal)  : 0);
        cnt   += (a->mailbox  ? strlen(a->mailbox)  : 0);
        cnt   += (a->adl      ? strlen(a->adl)      : 0);
        cnt   += (a->host     ? strlen(a->host)     : 0);

        /*

* add room for:
* possible single space between fullname and addr
* left and right brackets
* @ sign
* possible : for route addr
* ,
*
* So I really think that adding 7 is enough. Instead, I'll add 10.
*/ cnt += 10;

    }

    return(max(cnt, 50)); /* just making sure */ }

As you can see there is no memory resseravation for characters to be commented in mailbox.

rfc822_write_address_decode finally calls to rfc822_cat which decodes mailbox to address quoting special characters. Special characters are:

()<>@,;:\\\"[]\1\2\3\4\5\6\7\10\11\12\13\14\15\16\17\20\21\22\23\24\25\26\27\30\31\32\33\34\35\36\37\177

and, of cause, it's impossible to use \0 in shellcode.

--Thursday, November 7, 2002, 4:16:13 PM, you wrote to bugtraq@securityfocus.com:

LS>                            Security Advisory

LS>                            23rd October 2002

LS>            Remote pine version 4.44 denial of service

LS> Name:             Pine version 4.44
LS> Arch:             Redhat 7.2 i386
LS> Severity:         Medium
LS> Vendor URL:       
http://www.washington.edu/pine/
LS> Author:           Linus Sjöberg (lsjoberg@aland.net)
LS> Vendor notified:  14:th October 2002
LS> Vendor response:  14:th October 2002
LS> Vendor fix:       ??????

LS> Impact:   An attacker can send a fully legal email message with a crafted
LS>           From-header and thus forcing pine to core dump on startup.
LS>           The only way to launch pine is manually removing the bad message
LS>           either directly from the spool, or from another MUA. Until the
LS>           message has been removed or edited there is no way of accessing
LS>           the INBOX using pine.

LS> Description
LS> ***********

LS> When pine detects an email with a From-header looking like
LS> From: 
LS> "\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\""@host.fubar
Can we help you?X
LS> it will die with a segmentation fault. Note that the address is fully LS> legal, even if quite unusable. LS> When i reproduced the problem with a pine running within gdb I got the LS> following backtrack: LS> #0 0x401ea490 in chunk_free (ar_ptr=0x4029e300, p=0x83b65d8) at LS> malloc.c:3231 LS> #1 0x401ea3f4 in __libc_free (mem=0x83b65e0) at malloc.c:3154 LS> #2 0x081ef8e2 in fs_give (block=0xbfffb9b8) at fs_unix.c:60 LS> #3 0x080feb4f in set_index_addr LS> (idata=0xbfffc8c0, field=0x83012d8 "From", LS> addr=0x83b6160, prefix=0x0, width=18, LS> s=0xbfffbd11 LS> "\"\\\"\\\"\\\"\\\"\\\"\\\"\\\"\\\"\\\b`´:\bX½^?¿ïø\036\b") LS> at mailindx.c:4508 LS> #4 0x080fb397 in format_index_line (idata=0xbfffc8c0) at mailindx.c:3376 LS> #5 0x080f9ec4 in build_header_line (state=0x839f260, stream=0x83aba88, LS> msgmap=0x83a17b0, msgno=40) at mailindx.c:2761 LS> #6 0x080f71e3 in update_index (state=0x839f260, screen=0xbfffcb90) LS> at mailindx.c:1264 LS> #7 0x080f576c in index_lister (state=0x839f260, cntxt=0x83a8d28, LS> folder=0x839f325 "INBOX", stream=0x83aba88, msgmap=0x83a17b0) LS> at mailindx.c:603 LS> #8 0x080f5347 in mail_index_screen (state=0x839f260) at mailindx.c:452 LS> #9 0x081588e6 in main (argc=1, argv=0xbfffddc4) at pine.c:1122 LS> #10 0x40185657 in __libc_start_main (main=0x8156974
, argc=1, LS> ubp_av=0xbfffddc4, init=0x804ab28 <_init>, fini=0x8225c70 <_fini>, LS> rtld_fini=0x4000dcd4 <_dl_fini>, stack_end=0xbfffddbc) LS> at ../sysdeps/generic/libc-start.c:129 LS> Since pine dumped core it might be possible to execute code on the victims
LS> machine, but since I am not into those kind of games I leave that part for LS> others to find out.
Do you need more help?X

LS> The possibility of locking somebody out from his email is important enough LS> for an advisory+update IMHO.

LS> Fix Information
LS> ***************

LS> Washington University replied to my posting within a few hours and
LS> reported that the issue was to be fixed in version 4.50. They have not yet
Can't find what you're looking for?X
LS> made such a version publicly available after 1½ month, so I have chosen to LS> go public with this advisory even if there is no patch yet available.
-- 
~/ZARAZA
Êëÿíóñü ëûñèíîé ïðîðîêà Ìîèñåÿ - ÿ òåáÿ ñåé÷àñ ñúåì. (Òâåí)
Received on Sat Nov 9 14:37:15 2002

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Wed Aug 23 2006 - 14:07:37 EDT


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