Ethereal: Multiple vulnerabilities — GLSA 200503-16

Multiple vulnerabilities exist in Ethereal, which may allow an attacker to run arbitrary code or crash the program.

Affected packages

net-analyzer/ethereal on all architectures
Affected versions < 0.10.10
Unaffected versions >= 0.10.10

Background

Ethereal is a feature rich network protocol analyzer.

Description

There are multiple vulnerabilities in versions of Ethereal earlier than 0.10.10, including:

  • The Etheric, 3GPP2 A11 and IAPP dissectors are vulnerable to buffer overflows (CAN-2005-0704, CAN-2005-0699 and CAN-2005-0739).
  • The GPRS-LLC could crash when the "ignore cipher bit" option is enabled (CAN-2005-0705).
  • Various vulnerabilities in JXTA and sFlow dissectors.

Impact

An attacker might be able to use these vulnerabilities to crash Ethereal and 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. However, it is strongly recommended that you upgrade to the latest stable version.

Resolution

All Ethereal users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=net-analyzer/ethereal-0.10.10"

References

Release date
March 12, 2005

Latest revision
May 22, 2006: 03

Severity
high

Exploitable
remote

Bugzilla entries