Symantec Decomposer: Multiple Denial of Service Vulnerabilities

SYMSA1147
Last Updated February 27, 2008
Initial Publication Date February 27, 2008
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  • Status: Closed
  • Severity: High
  • CVSS Base Score: 7.1

Two Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerabilities have been identified impact a older versions of the Symantec Decomposer when parsing RAR archive content for malicious content.

Severity

Medium
Remote Access Yes
Local Access No
Authentication Required No
Exploit publicly available No

Products Affected

Products Versions Builds Update To
Symantec AntiVirus for Network Attached Storage 4.3.16.39 & earlier All 4.3.18.43
Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine 4.3.16.39 and earlier All 4.3.18.43
Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine for Caching 4.3.16.39 & earlier All 4.3.18.43
Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine for Clearswift 4.3.16.39 & earlier All 4.3.18.43
Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine for Messaging 4.3.16.39 & earlier All 4.3.18.43
Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine for MS ISA 4.3.16.39 & earlier All 4.3.18.43
Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine for MS SharePoint 4.3.16.39 & earlier All 4.3.18.43
Symantec AntiVirus/Filtering for Domino MPE(AIX, Linux, Solaris) All All 3.2.2
Symantec Mail Security for Microsoft Exchange 4.6.5.12 and earlier All 4.6.8.120
5.0.4.363.and earlier All 5.0.6.368
Symantec Scan Engine 5.1.4.24 and earlier All 5.1.6.31

Products Not Affected

Products Versions Builds
Norton AntiVirus All All
Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh All All
Norton Personal Firewall All All
Norton System Works All All
Norton360 All All
Norton Internet Security All All
Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition All All
Symantec AntiVirus for Handhelds All All
Symantec AntiVirus for HandHelds - Corporate Edition All All
Symantec AntiVirus for Macintosh All All
Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam All All
Symantec Client Security All All
Symantec Client Security for Nokia All All
Symantec Clientless VPN Gateway 4400 Series All All
Symantec Endpoint Protection All All
Symantec Enterprise Firewall All All
Symantec Firewall / VPN Appliance 100/200 All
Symantec Gateway Security All All
Symantec Gateway Security 300/400 Series 2.0 All
Symantec Gateway Security 5000 Series 3.0.1 All
Symantec Gateway Security 5400 Series 2.0.1 All
Symantec Internet Security for Macintosh All All
Symantec Mail Appliance All All
Symantec Mail Security for Domino NT All All
Symantec Mail Security for Microsoft Exchange 6.0.X All
Symantec Mail Security for SMTP All All
Symantec System Works for Macintosh All All
Symantec Web Security All All
Symantec Web Security for Microsoft ISA 2004 All All
Note: Only currently supported Symantec Products are being updated. Customers using unsupported versions are encouraged to upgrade to a supported version.

Details

Two DoS vulnerabilities were identified of Symantec’s Decomposer engine related to scanning RAR archive content. The first issue is triggered when it receives malicious content. If sufficiently malformed, this could possibly cause large amounts of memory to be consumed which could result in a Denial of Service. The second issue is a buffer overflow that can cause the decomposer to crash causing a Denial of Service condition and the potential for remote code execution.

SecurityFocus, http://www.securityfocus.com, has assigned Bugtraq IDs(BID) to this issue for inclusion in the SecurityFocus vulnerability data base. The BIDs assigned are 27911 and 27913 which can be found at http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/27911 and http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/27913

CVE

This issue is a candidate for inclusion in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) list (http://cve.mitre.org), which standardizes names for security problems. The CVE initiative has assigned CVE-2008-0308 and CVE-2008-0309 for these issues.

 

Symantec Response

Updates are available for affected products. Symantec recommends customers apply the latest product update available for their supported product versions to enhance their security posture and protect against potential security threats of this nature.

Symantec is not aware of any customers impacted by this issue, or of any attempts to exploit the issue.

Product updates are available from the Symantec support site: http://www.symantec.com/techsupp/ or via LiveUpdate when available.

Symantec product users who regularly launch and run LiveUpdate should already have received an updated (non-vulnerable) version of (product/component). However, to ensure all available updates have been applied, users can manually launch and run LiveUpdate in Interactive mode as follows:

To perform a manual update using Symantec LiveUpdate, users should:
  • Open any installed Symantec product
  • Click on LiveUpdate in the toolbar
  • Run LiveUpdate until all available Symantec product updates are downloaded and installed

Best Practices

As part of normal best practices, Symantec strongly recommends:
  • Restrict access to administration or management systems to privileged users.
  • Restrict remote access, if required, to trusted/authorized systems only.
  • Run under the principle of least privilege where possible to limit the impact of exploit by threats such as this.
  • Keep all operating systems and applications updated with the latest vendor patches.
  • Follow a multi-layered approach to security. Run both firewall and antivirus applications, at a minimum, to provide multiple points of detection and protection to both inbound and outbound threats.
  • Deploy network intrusion detection systems to monitor network traffic for signs of anomalous or suspicious activity. This may aid in detection of attacks or malicious activity related to exploitation of latent vulnerabilities

Symantec would like to thank iDefense for reporting these issues and providing full coordination while Symantec resolved them.

Legacy ID: SYM08-006

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