ProFTPd mod_sftp/mod_sftp_pam invalid pool allocation during kbdint authentication

2013-09-14 / 2013-09-17
Credit: Kingcope
Risk: High
Local: No
Remote: Yes
CWE: N/A


CVSS Base Score: 5/10
Impact Subscore: 2.9/10
Exploitability Subscore: 10/10
Exploit range: Remote
Attack complexity: Low
Authentication: No required
Confidentiality impact: None
Integrity impact: None
Availability impact: Partial

ProFTPd installs with mod_sftp and mod_sftp_pam activated contain the vulnerability described in this post. The current stable release of ProFTPd is 1.3.4d and the current release candidate is 1.3.5rc3. First I have to note that this vulnerability is unlikely to be exploited. There is a way to control $rip instruction pointer on 64 bit systems, for example on the Ubuntu 64Bit platform but I believe that it is not possible to get full code execution with this bug. The bug is useful to trigger a large heap allocation and exhaust all available system memory of the underlying operating system. Inside the file located at proftpd-1.3.5rc2/contrib/mod_sftp/kbdint.c ProFTPd handles the SSH keyboard interactive authentication procedure, in this case it will use pam as an authentication library therefore mod_sftp_pam has to be active for an installation to be vulnerable. Source code file and line kbdint.c:300 reads: [1] resp_count = sftp_msg_read_int(pkt->pool, &buf, &buflen); [2] list = make_array(p, resp_count, sizeof(char *)); for (i = 0; i < resp_count; i++) { char *resp; resp = sftp_msg_read_string(pkt->pool, &buf, &buflen); *((char **) push_array(list)) = pstrdup(p, sftp_utf8_decode_str(p, resp)); } Line 1 will read the kbdint response count which is an unsigned integer with a size of 32 bits from the client during an SSH kbdint userauth info response client request. This value is used to allocate a buffer with the size user_supplied_uint32_value multiplied by the size of a char pointer being 32bits or 64bits depending on the platform. There is no size check before the request is sent to the pool allocator that is called by make_array at Line 2. The pool allocator can be tricked to handle negative allocation sizes if resp_count is large enough. There is a size check of the response count value but it&#8217;s done after this function returns. The DoS condition can be triggered by sending an int32 value for resp_count that is slightly below the available memory of the target system and repeating the request. Noteably OpenSSH vulnerability CVE-2002-0640 is very similar to this ProFTPd vulnerability. It has the very same code path. Here is a reference to the OpenSSH Challenge-Response Authentication bug that was exploited by GOBBLES Security in their year 2002 sshutuptheo.tgz exploit: http://lwn.net/Articles/3531/. Usage of keyboard interactive authentication in ProFTPd mod_sftp is rare as it is not activated by default. Cheers, Kingcope

References:

http://kingcope.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/proftpd-mod_sftpmod_sftp_pam-invalid-pool-allocation-in-kbdint-authentication/


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