Title: Ettercap Large Packet Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
Severity: CRITICAL
Description:
Ettercap is a multipurpose packet sniffer for Linux and BSD based systems. It includes support for features such as character injection and packet filtering. Ettercap has been ported to Windows.
Ettercap supports modular decoders, used to extract information based on a communication protocol. A buffer overflow condition exists in some of these modules. A call to memcpy() uses a target data structure with a fixed length buffer defined as 2000 bytes, which is filled with packet data. If packets larger than this are interpreted, stack memory may become corrupted, leading to the execution of arbitrary code.
Ethernet defines a maximum transfer unit size of 1500 bytes, well below this limit. However, some interfaces support significantly larger MTUs. Additionally, it has been reported that this condition may be exploited through forged packet headers which report a data length in excess of 2000 bytes.
Ettercap would normally be executed as the root user, although it is not installed (nor does it support) suid by default. Exploitation of this vulnerability may lead to code execution with root privileges.
Earlier versions of Ettercap may share this vulnerability.
Affected Products:
- Ettercap Ettercap 0.6.3.1
References:
- Ettercap: Ettercap Homepage
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