Multiple "memory alignment errors" in libgadu, as used in ekg before 1.6rc2, Gaim before 1.5.0, and other packages, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (bus error) on certain architectures such as SPARC via an incoming message.

This advisory adds security support for the stable amd64 distribution.
It covers all security updates since the release of sarge, which were missing updated packages for the not yet official amd64 port. Future security advisories will include updates for this port as well.

Several remote vulnerabilities have been discovered in ekg, a console Gadu Gadu client. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems :

  - CVE-2005-2370     It was discovered that memory alignment errors may allow     remote attackers to cause a denial of service on certain     architectures such as sparc. This only affects Debian     Sarge.

  - CVE-2005-2448     It was discovered that several endianess errors may     allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service.
    This only affects Debian Sarge.

  - CVE-2007-1663     It was discovered that a memory leak in handling image     messages may lead to denial of service. This only     affects Debian Etch.

  - CVE-2007-1664     It was discovered that a NULL pointer deference in the     token OCR code may lead to denial of service. This only     affects Debian Etch.

  - CVE-2007-1665     It was discovered that a memory leak in the token OCR     code may lead to denial of service. This only affects     Debian Etch.

Updated kdenetwork packages to correct a security flaw in Kopete are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

This update has been rated as having critical security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.

The kdenetwork package contains networking applications for the K Desktop Environment. Kopete is a KDE instant messenger which supports a number of protocols including ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, and Gadu-Gadu.

Multiple integer overflow flaws were found in the way Kopete processes Gadu-Gadu messages. A remote attacker could send a specially crafted Gadu-Gadu message which would cause Kopete to crash or possibly execute arbitrary code. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project assigned the name CVE-2005-1852 to this issue.

In order to be affected by this issue, a user would need to have registered with Gadu-Gadu and be signed in to the Gadu-Gadu server in order to receive a malicious message. In addition, Red Hat believes that the Exec-shield technology (enabled by default in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4) would block attempts to remotely exploit this vulnerability.

Note that this issue does not affect Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 or 3.

Users of Kopete should update to these packages which contain a patch to correct this issue.

An updated gaim package that fixes multiple security issues is now available.

This update has been rated as having critical security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.

Gaim is an Internet Messaging client.

A heap based buffer overflow issue was discovered in the way Gaim processes away messages. A remote attacker could send a specially crafted away message to a Gaim user logged into AIM or ICQ that could result in arbitrary code execution. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2005-2103 to this issue.

Daniel Atallah discovered a denial of service issue in Gaim. A remote attacker could attempt to upload a file with a specially crafted name to a user logged into AIM or ICQ, causing Gaim to crash. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2005-2102 to this issue.

A denial of service bug was found in Gaim's Gadu Gadu protocol handler. A remote attacker could send a specially crafted message to a Gaim user logged into Gadu Gadu, causing Gaim to crash. Please note that this issue only affects PPC and IBM S/390 systems running Gaim.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2005-2370 to this issue.

Users of gaim are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which contains backported patches and is not vulnerable to these issues.

Wojtek Kaniewski reports :

Multiple vulnerabilities have been found in libgadu, a library for handling Gadu-Gadu instant messaging protocol. It is a part of ekg, a Gadu-Gadu client, but is widely used in other clients. Also some of the user contributed scripts were found to behave in an insecure manner.

- integer overflow in libgadu (CVE-2005-1852) that could be triggered by an incomming message and lead to application crash and/or remote code execution

- insecure file creation (CVE-2005-1850) and shell command injection (CVE-2005-1851) in other user contributed scripts (discovered by Marcin Owsiany and Wojtek Kaniewski)

- several signedness errors in libgadu that could be triggered by an incomming network data or an application passing invalid user input to the library

- memory alignment errors in libgadu that could be triggered by an incomming message and lead to bus errors on architectures like SPARC

- endianness errors in libgadu that could cause invalid behaviour of applications on big-endian architectures

Daniel Atallah discovered a Denial of Service vulnerability in the file transfer handler of OSCAR (the module that handles various instant messaging protocols like ICQ). A remote attacker could crash the Gaim client of an user by attempting to send him a file with a name that contains invalid UTF-8 characters. (CAN-2005-2102)

It was found that specially crafted 'away' messages triggered a buffer overflow. A remote attacker could exploit this to crash the Gaim client or possibly even execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the Gaim user. (CAN-2005-2103)

Szymon Zygmunt and Michal Bartoszkiewicz discovered a memory alignment error in the Gadu library, which was fixed in USN-162-1.
However, it was discovered that Gaim contains a copy of the vulnerable code. By sending specially crafted messages over the Gadu protocol, a remote attacker could crash Gaim. (CAN-2005-2370).

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

Marcin Owsiany and Wojtek Kaniewski discovered that some contributed scripts (contrib/ekgh, contrib/ekgnv.sh, and contrib/getekg.sh) in the ekg package created temporary files in an insecure way, which allowed exploitation of a race condition to create or overwrite files with the privileges of the user invoking the script. (CAN-2005-1850)

Marcin Owsiany and Wojtek Kaniewski discovered a shell command injection vulnerability in a contributed utility (contrib/scripts/ekgbot-pre1.py). By sending specially crafted content to the bot, an attacker could exploit this to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running ekgbot. (CAN-2005-1851)

Marcin Slusarz discovered an integer overflow in the Gadu library. By sending a specially crafted incoming message, a remote attacker could execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the application using libgadu. (CAN-2005-1852)

Eric Romang discovered that another contributed script (contrib/scripts/linki.py) created temporary files in an insecure way, which allowed exploitation of a race condition to create or overwrite files with the privileges of the user invoking the script.
(CAN-2005-1916)

Grzegorz Jaskiewicz discovered several integer overflows in the Gadu library. A remote attacker could exploit this to crash the Gadu client application or even execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user by sending specially crafted messages. (CAN-2005-2369)

Szymon Zygmunt and Michal Bartoszkiewicz discovered a memory alignment error in the Gadu library. By sending specially crafted messages, a remote attacker could crash the application using the library. (CAN-2005-2370)

Marcin Slusarz discovered that the Gadu library did not properly handle endianess conversion in some cases. This caused invalid behavior on big endian architectures. The only affected supported architecture is powerpc. (CAN-2005-2448).

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

Yet more vulnerabilities have been discovered in the gaim IM client.
Invalid characters in a sent file can cause Gaim to crash on some systems (CVE-2005-2102); a remote AIM or ICQ user can cause a buffer overflow in Gaim by setting an away message containing many AIM substitution strings (CVE-2005-2103); a memory alignment bug in the library used by Gaim to access the Gadu-Gadu network can result in a buffer overflow on non-x86 architecture systems (CVE-2005-2370).

These problems have been corrected in gaim 1.5.0 which is provided with this update.

New gaim packages are available for Slackware 9.0, 9.1, 10.0, 10.1, and -current to fix some security issues. including: AIM/ICQ away message buffer overflow AIM/ICQ non-UTF-8 filename crash Gadu-Gadu memory alignment bug Sites that use GAIM should upgrade to the new version.

Several problems have been discovered in libgadu which is also part of centericq, a text-mode multi-protocol instant messenger client. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems :

  - CAN-2005-2369     Multiple integer signedness errors may allow remote     attackers to cause a denial of service or execute     arbitrary code.

  - CAN-2005-2370

    Memory alignment errors may allows remote attackers to     cause a denial of service on certain architectures such     as sparc.

  - CAN-2005-2448

    Several endianess errors may allow remote attackers to     cause a denial of service.

The remote host seems to be running Gaim, a popular open-source, multi-protocol instant messenger. It is reported that this version of Gaim is vulnerable to several remote flaws.  An attacker exploiting these flaws would be able to create a Denial of Service (DoS) condition or possibly overflow system memory and execute arbitrary code.

Szymon Zygmunt and Michal Bartoszkiewicz discovered a memory alignment error in libgadu (from ekg, console Gadu Gadu client, an instant messaging program) which is included in gaim, a multi-protocol instant messaging client, as well. This can not be exploited on the x86 architecture but on others, e.g. on Sparc and lead to a bus error, in other words a denial of service.

The old stable distribution (woody) does not seem to be affected by this problem.

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the RHSA-2005:639 advisory.

  - security flaw (CVE-2005-1852, CVE-2005-2369, CVE-2005-2370, CVE-2005-2448)

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
57528	Debian DSA-773-1 : amd64 - several vulnerabilities	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	critical
25584	Debian DSA-1318-1 : ekg - several vulnerabilities	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	medium
21954	CentOS 4 : kdenetwork (CESA-2005:639)	Nessus	CentOS Local Security Checks	high
21846	CentOS 3 / 4 : gaim (CESA-2005:627)	Nessus	CentOS Local Security Checks	high
21414	FreeBSD : libgadu -- multiple vulnerabilities (3b4a6982-0b24-11da-bc08-0001020eed82)	Nessus	FreeBSD Local Security Checks	critical
20574	Ubuntu 4.10 / 5.04 : gaim vulnerabilities (USN-168-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	high
20568	Ubuntu 5.04 : ekg vulnerabilities (USN-162-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	critical
19896	Mandrake Linux Security Advisory : gaim (MDKSA-2005:139)	Nessus	Mandriva Local Security Checks	high
19860	Slackware 10.0 / 10.1 / 9.0 / 9.1 / current : gaim (SSA:2005-242-03)	Nessus	Slackware Local Security Checks	high
19709	Debian DSA-813-1 : centericq - several vulnerabilities	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	high
19423	RHEL 3 / 4 : gaim (RHSA-2005:627)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	high
3160	Gaim < 1.3.2 Multiple Vulnerabilities	Nessus Network Monitor	Internet Messengers	medium
19318	Debian DSA-769-1 : gaim - memory alignment bug	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	medium
19286	RHEL 4 : kdenetwork (RHSA-2005:639)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	high

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2005-2370

high

Tenable Plugins

critical

medium

high

high

critical

high

critical

high

high

high

high

medium

medium

high