Title: Portmon USER Environment Variable Buffer Overrun Vulnerability
Severity: MODERATE
Description:
Portmon is a freely available, open source network service monitoring utility. It is available for Unix and Linux operating systems.
A vulnerability has been discovered in Portmon version 1.8 and earlier. The problem occurs due to insufficient bounds checking before copying the USER environment variable into an internal memory buffer.
The problem specifically lies when calling the sprintf() library function to copy the USER environment variable data into the dynamically allocated err_msg buffer. The err_msg buffer is allocated using the following library call: (char *)malloc(128 * sizeof(char));. As a result, including approximately 129 bytes of data within the environment variable could allow an attacker to overwrite adjacent heap memory management structures and other values on the heap.
Although unconfirmed, this could potentially be exploited by an attacker to execute arbitrary code.
It should be noted that Portmon may not be installed setuid root by default, however a configuration option exists which allows an administrator to specify that the utility should in fact be installed setuid.
Affected Products:
- Portmon Portmon 1.0.0
- Portmon Portmon 1.1.0
- Portmon Portmon 1.2.0
- Portmon Portmon 1.3.0
- Portmon Portmon 1.4.0
- Portmon Portmon 1.5.0
- Portmon Portmon 1.6.0
- Portmon Portmon 1.7.0
- Portmon Portmon 1.8.0
References:
- <auto94042@hushmail.com>: portmon <=1.8 buffer over flow !
- Portmon: Portmon Home Page
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