J-Security Center

Title: iPlanet Directory Server Format String Vulnerabilities

Severity: CRITICAL

Description:

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is designed to be a lightweight access protocol for directory services supporting X.500 models. It offers a means of searching, fetching and manipulating directory content.

Several potential format string vulnerabilities have been found to exist in the LDAP implementation used by the iPlanet Directory Server. The problems were discovered using the PROTOS project's LDAPv3 test suite, which tests the security of a server by presenting it with a wide variety of sample packets containing unexpected values or illegally formatted data.

Specifically, the vulnerabilities were found during tests from the "Application" section of the test suite, which tests an LDAP server's response to packets that trigger LDAP-specific application anomolies. Several of the test cases failed, possibly indicating the presence of format string vulnerabilities.

The problems likely exist due to user-supplied data being passed as the format specifier argument to a function in the printf family of functions. It may be possible for a remote attacker to cause process memory to be overwritten by supplying certain format specifiers, enabling the attacker to cause the execution of supplied shellcode. Because the server typically runs with system privileges, this may lead to full system compromise.

Further technical details are not available at this time.

Affected Products:

  • iPlanet Directory Server 3.0.0 x
  • iPlanet Directory Server 4.0.0
  • iPlanet Directory Server 4.11.0
  • iPlanet Directory Server 4.12.0
  • iPlanet Directory Server 4.13.0
  • iPlanet Directory Server 5.0.0 beta

References:

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