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Vulnerability Note VU#446897

CUPS buffer overflow vulnerability

Overview

The Common Unix Printing System contains a buffer overflow vulnerability. This vulnerability may allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code.

I. Description

The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) is a printing service used by many Linux and Unix operating systems. CUPS uses a print scheduling process that dispatches print jobs and provides the printer's status to local and remote programs.

The Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) is a standard protocol that defines printing and managing print ques. As specified in RFC 2910, the IPP transport layer consists of an HTTP/1.1 request or response. Section 3.5 of RFC 2910 specifies two different types of tags that can either delimit sections of protocols (delimiter tags) or specify the type of each attribute value (value tags). textWithLanguage tags are defined in section 4.1.1.2 and nameWithLanguage is defined in section 4.1.2.2.

Per Secunia Advisory 2007-76:

    Secunia Research has discovered a vulnerability in CUPS, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system.

    The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error within the "ippReadIO()" function in cups/ipp.c when processing IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) tags. This can be exploited to overwrite one byte on the stack with a zero by sending an IPP request containing specially crafted "textWithLanguage" or "nameWithLanguage" tags.

    Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code.

II. Impact

A remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the CUPS server or cause the server to crash. The cupsd daemon may run with root privileges.

III. Solution

Administrators and users should see the systems affected portion of this document for a partial list of affected vendors. Users who compile CUPS from source should see CUPS Article #508: Common UNIX Printing System 1.3.4 for information about obtaining fixed software.


Restrict access

Restricting access to CUPS servers by using the CUPS configuration directives, firewall rules, or access control lists may mitigate this vulnerability. By default, cupsd listens on port 631/udp. Systems that use CUPS exclusively for local printing should set the Listen directive to localhost:631 in the cupsd configuration file to prevent remote systems from exploiting this vulnerability.

Systems Affected

VendorStatusDate NotifiedDate Updated
Apple Computer, Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007
Conectiva Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007
Cray Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007
CUPS, the Common UNIX Printing SystemVulnerable1-Nov-2007
Debian GNU/LinuxUnknown1-Nov-2007
EMC CorporationNot Vulnerable2-Nov-2007
Engarde Secure LinuxUnknown1-Nov-2007
F5 Networks, Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007
Fedora ProjectUnknown1-Nov-2007
FreeBSD, Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007
FujitsuUnknown1-Nov-2007
Gentoo LinuxUnknown1-Nov-2007
Hewlett-Packard CompanyNot Vulnerable5-Nov-2007
HitachiUnknown1-Nov-2007
IBM CorporationUnknown1-Nov-2007
IBM Corporation (zseries)Unknown1-Nov-2007
IBM eServerUnknown1-Nov-2007
Immunix Communications, Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007
Ingrian Networks, Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007
Juniper Networks, Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007
Mandriva, Inc.Vulnerable6-Nov-2007
Microsoft CorporationUnknown1-Nov-2007
MontaVista Software, Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007
NEC CorporationUnknown1-Nov-2007
NetBSDUnknown1-Nov-2007
NokiaUnknown1-Nov-2007
Novell, Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007
OpenBSDUnknown1-Nov-2007
Openwall GNU/*/LinuxUnknown1-Nov-2007
QNX, Software Systems, Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007
Red Hat, Inc.Vulnerable2-Nov-2007
Silicon Graphics, Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007
Slackware Linux Inc.Not Vulnerable2-Nov-2007
Sony CorporationNot Vulnerable2-Nov-2007
Sun Microsystems, Inc.Not Vulnerable5-Nov-2007
SUSE LinuxVulnerable5-Nov-2007
The SCO GroupUnknown1-Nov-2007
Trustix Secure LinuxUnknown1-Nov-2007
TurbolinuxUnknown1-Nov-2007
UbuntuVulnerable6-Nov-2007
UnisysUnknown1-Nov-2007
Wind River Systems, Inc.Unknown1-Nov-2007

References


http://www.cups.org/articles.php?L508
http://secunia.com/secunia_research/2007-76/advisory/
http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/spec-design.html
http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/man-cupsd.conf.html
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2910#section-3.5
http://en.opensuse.org/AppArmor_Geeks
http://www.cups.org/articles.php?L508
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/info/faq.cfm
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307179

Credit

This vulnerability was published in Secunia Advisory 2007-76.

This document was written by Ryan Giobbi.

Other Information

Date Public:2007-10-31
Date First Published:2007-11-01
Date Last Updated:2007-12-18
CERT Advisory: 
CVE-ID(s):CVE-2007-4351
NVD-ID(s):CVE-2007-4351
US-CERT Technical Alerts: 
Metric:11.88
Document Revision:22

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