Vulnerability Note VU#730169

Atheros wireless network drivers may fail to properly handle malformed frames

This overflow occurs because the driver does not properly process management frames. An attacker within radio range may be able to trigger the overflow by sending a specially-crafted 802.11 management frame to a vulnerable system. Since 802.11b, 802.11g, and 802.11n management frames are not encrypted or authenticated, using wireless encryption (WEP/WPA) does not mitigate this vulnerability.

Note that Linux or Unix systems that use NDISWrapper or similar technologies to load the affected driver may also be vulnerable.

II. Impact

Atheros has released an update (firmware versions 5.3.0.35 and 6.0.3.67 and later) to original equipment manufacturers to address this issue. Users should see the systems affected portion of this document for a partial list of affected vendors.

Disable the affected wireless adapter

Until updates can be applied, turning off the affected wireless adapter may mitigate this vulnerability.

Systems Affected

http://www.atheros.com/contact/index.html
http://standards.ieee.org/announcements/pr_frames.html
http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802.11-1999.pdf
http://secunia.com/advisories/26348/

Credit

Thanks to Nicholas Krasny of IBM Managed Security Services for information about this vulnerability and to Jeremy Kelley for reporting.

This document was written by Ryan Giobbi.

Other Information

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