Vulnerability Note VU#298233

Samba contains buffer overflow in SMB/CIFS packet fragment reassembly code

Original Release date: 17 Mar 2003 | Last revised: 15 May 2003

Overview

A buffer overflow vulnerability has been discovered in Samba. An updated version has been released.

Description

A remotely exploitable buffer overflow vulnerability was discoved to affect Samba versions 2.0.x through 2.2.7a. From their bulletin:

    The SuSE security audit team, in particular Sebastian Krahmer, has found a flaw in the Samba main smbd code which could allow an external attacker to remotely and anonymously gain Super User (root) privileges on a server running a Samba server.

    This flaw exists in previous versions of Samba from 2.0.x to 2.2.7a inclusive. This is a serious problem and all sites should either upgrade to Samba 2.2.8 immediately or prohibit access to TCP ports 139 and 445. Advice created by Andrew Tridgell, the leader of the Samba Team, on how to protect an unpatched Samba server is given at the end of this section.

    The SMB/CIFS protocol implemented by Samba is vulnerable to many attacks, even without specific security holes. The TCP ports 139 and the new port 445 (used by Win2k and the Samba 3.0 alpha code in particular) should never be exposed to untrusted networks.

Impact

A remote attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the Super User, typically root.

Solution

Upgrade to Samba version 2.2.8.

The "Protecting an unpatched Samba server" section of the Samba bulletin discusses several work arounds for unpatched servers.

Systems Affected (Learn More)

VendorStatusDate NotifiedDate Updated
Apple Computer Inc.Affected-25 Mar 2003
ConectivaAffected-17 Mar 2003
DebianAffected-17 Mar 2003
FreeBSDAffected-10 Apr 2003
Gentoo LinuxAffected-17 Mar 2003
Hewlett-Packard CompanyAffected-19 Mar 2003
IBMAffected-10 Apr 2003
MandrakeSoftAffected-17 Mar 2003
MontaVista SoftwareAffected-17 Mar 2003
OpenPKGAffected-19 Mar 2003
Red Hat Inc.Affected-25 Mar 2003
Samba TeamAffected-17 Mar 2003
SGIAffected-20 Mar 2003
Sun Microsystems Inc.Affected-15 May 2003
SuSE Inc.Affected-19 Mar 2003
If you are a vendor and your product is affected, let us know.View More »

CVSS Metrics (Learn More)

Group Score Vector
Base N/A N/A
Temporal N/A N/A
Environmental N/A N/A

References

Credit

Thanks to Sebastian Krahmer for reporting this vulnerability.

This document was written by Jason A Rafail.

Other Information

  • CVE IDs: CAN-2003-0085
  • Date Public: 16 Mar 2003
  • Date First Published: 17 Mar 2003
  • Date Last Updated: 15 May 2003
  • Severity Metric: 23.62
  • Document Revision: 8

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