Vulnerability in Unchecked DNS Data Title: Vulnerability in Unchecked DNS Data Date Issued: November 18, 1996 Last Modified: November 18, 1996 Code: SNI-01 Source: Network Associates (was SNI) ###### ## ## ###### ## ### ## ## ###### ## # ## ## ## ## ### ## ###### . ## ## . ###### . Secure Networks Inc. Security Advisory November 18, 1996 Vulnerability in Unchecked DNS Data. In research for our upcoming network auditing tool, we have uncovered a serious problem present in implementations of BIND which trust invalid data sent to them. This vulnerability specifically applies to hostname to address resolution and can result in local and remote users obtaining root privileges. It is recommended that security conscious users upgrade to the latest version of the BIND resolver immediately. Information on obtaining the latest official release is provided at the end of this message. Technical Details ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ When a standard hostname lookup is performed on internet connected systems, the resulting address should be 4 bytes (Forgetting about IPv6 for now). Assuming that the address will always be 4 bytes, many privileged and unprivileged programs (including network daemons) trust the address length field which is returned from gethostbyname() in the hostent structure. By trusting the length field returned by DNS to be 4 bytes, it then copies the address into a 4 byte address variable. The vulnerability exists due to the fact that we can specify the size of IP address data within the DNS packet ourselves. By specifying a size larger than 4 bytes, an overflow occurs, as the program attempts to copy the data into the 4 byte structure it has allocated to store the address. One example of this vulnerability occurs in rcmd.c, the standard BSD library routine which is used by rsh and rlogin to remotely connect to systems. Note that the code itself is not faulty, however the resolver implementation is. Example code follows: hp = gethostbyname(*ahost); if (hp == NULL) { herror(*ahost); return (-1); } *ahost = hp->h_name; . . . bzero(&sin, sizeof sin); sin.sin_len = sizeof(struct sockaddr_in); sin.sin_family = hp->h_addrtype; sin.sin_port = rport; bcopy(hp->h_addr_list[0], &sin.sin_addr, hp->h_length); In this example, we copy hp->h_length ammount of data into the address variable of a sockaddr_in structure, which is 4 bytes. The hp->h_length variable is taken directly from the DNS reply packet. If we now look at how rcmd() declares it's variables, and after looking through rlogin with a debugger, we can determine that this is a dangerous situation. int rcmd(ahost, rport, locuser, remuser, cmd, fd2p) char **ahost; u_short rport; const char *locuser, *remuser, *cmd; int *fd2p; { struct hostent *hp; struct sockaddr_in sin, from; fd_set reads; On further testing, and implementation of exploitation code, we can verify that this is indeed possible via the rlogin service. In order to exploit the problem, we first start a program to send a fake DNS replies. [root@ariel] [Dec 31 1969 11:59:59pm] [~]% ./dnsfake oakmont.secnet.com(4732)->idoru.secnet.com(53) : lookup: random-domain.com (1:1) sent packet fake reply: 270 bytes idoru.secnet.com(53)->oakmont.secnet.com(4732) : reply: random-domain.com (1:1) We then cause rcmd() within rlogin to do a host lookup and response with our false data. [oliver@oakmont] [Dec 31 1969 11:58:59pm] [~]% whoami oliver [oliver@oakmont] [Jan 01 1970 00:00:01am] [~]% rlogin random-domain.com random-domain.com: Connection refused # whoami root # Impact ~~~~~~ By checking common BSD sources, we can see that over 20 local programs are vulnerable to this attack, and possibly 2 remote daemons. The possibility of exploiting local programs may seem insignificant, however if one considers an attacker somewhere on the internet intercepting DNS lookups, and inserting their own replies, it isn't. There is a real threat of passive attacks present here, whereby any user on a network running any of these programs can be a victim. Take for instance traceroute, or ping both of which fall prey to this problem. Aside from stock UN*X programs which ship with most vendor operating systems, there appears to be problems related to h_length in external software packages. Due to the flaw, FWTK (Firewall Toolkit) a freely available firewall kit appears vulnerable. The generic routine, conn_server(), which is utilizied by the proxy servers, appears to trust the data as well. Vulnerable Systems ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ At this point we would assume that most vendor systems who have incorporated BIND directly into their operating system are vulnerable. Solaris is not vulnerable according to Casper Dik Fix Information ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The maintainers of BIND, and CERT were notified of this problem several months previous to this posting. We recommend upgrading to the latest release of BIND which solves this problem due to the incorporation of IPv6 address support. The latest official release of BIND is available at: ftp.vix.com in the directory /pub/bind/release/4.9.5 Copyright Notice ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The contents of this advisory are Copyright (C) 1997 Secure Networks Inc, and may be distributed freely provided that no fee is charged for distribution, and that proper credit is given. You can find Secure Networks papers at ftp://ftp.secnet.com/pub/papers and advisories at ftp://ftp.secnet.com/advisories You can browse our web site at http://www.secnet.com You can subscribe to our security advisory mailing list by sending mail to majordomo@secnet.com with the line "subscribe sni-advisories" Attributions ~~~~~~~~~~~~ We wish to acknowledge and thank Theo Deraadt, the maintainer of the OpenBSD operating system for his help in finding and analyzing this problem. More information on OpenBSD can be found at http://www.openbsd.org. - Oliver Friedrichs -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.3ia mQCNAzJATn0AAAEEAJeGbZyoCw14fCoAMeBRKiZ3L6JMbd9f4BtwdtYTwD42/Uz1 A/4UiRJzRLGhARpt1J06NVQEKXQDbejxGIGzAGTcyqUCKH6yNAncqoep3+PKIQJd Kd23buvbk7yUgyVlqQHDDsW0zMKdlSO7rYByT6zsW0Rv5JmHJh/bLKAOe7p9AAUR tCVPbGl2ZXIgRnJpZWRyaWNocyA8b2xpdmVyQHNlY25ldC5jb20+iQCVAwUQMkBO fR/bLKAOe7p9AQEBOAQAkTXiBzf4a31cYYDFmiLWgXq0amQ2lsamdrQohIMEDXe8 45SoGwBzXHVh+gnXCQF2zLxaucKLG3SXPIg+nJWhFczX2Fo97HqdtFmx0Y5IyMgU qRgK/j8KyJRdVliM1IkX8rf3Bn+ha3xn0yrWlTZMF9nL7iVPBsmgyMOuXwZ7ZB8= =xq4f -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Oliver Friedrichs - (403) 262-9211 - Secure Networks Inc. Suite 440, 703-6th Avenue S.W. Calgary, AB, Canada, T2P 0T9