Unknown vulnerability in tcpdump before 3.7.2 related to an inability to "Handle unknown RADIUS attributes properly," allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop), a different vulnerability than CAN-2003-0093.

A problem has been discovered in tcpdump, a powerful tool for network monitoring and data acquisition. An attacker is able to send a specially crafted RADIUS network packet which causes tcpdump to enter an infinite loop.

A vulnerability was discovered by Andrew Griffiths and iDEFENSE Labs in the tcpdump program. By sending a specially crafted network packet, an attacker is able to to cause tcpdump to enter an infinite loop. In addition, the tcpdump developers found a potential infinite loop when tcpdump parses malformed BGP packets. A buffer overflow was also discovered that can be exploited with certain malformed NFS packets.

Updated tcpdump packages that fix an infinite loop vulnerability and drop privileges on startup are now available.

Tcpdump is a command-line tool for monitoring network traffic.

A vulnerability exists in tcpdump before 3.7.2 and is related to an inability to handle unknown RADIUS attributes properly. This vulnerability allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop).

The Red Hat tcpdump packages advertise that, by default, tcpdump will drop privileges to user 'pcap'. Due to a compilation error this did not happen, and tcpdump would run as root unless the '-U' flag was specified.

Users of tcpdump are advised to upgrade to these errata packages, which contain a patch correcting the RADIUS issue and are compiled so that by default tcpdump will drop privileges to the 'pcap' user.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Type	Severity
15098	Debian DSA-261-1 : tcpdump - infinite loop	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	Local	medium
14011	Mandrake Linux Security Advisory : tcpdump (MDKSA-2003:027)	Nessus	Mandriva Local Security Checks	Local	high
12392	RHEL 2.1 : tcpdump (RHSA-2003:151)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	Local	medium

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2003-0145

high

Tenable Plugins

medium

high

medium