Bugtraq mailing list archives
CERT Vendor-Initiated Bulletin VB-98.01 - excite
From: aleph1 () DFW DFW NET (Aleph One)
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 11:33:42 -0600
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- ============================================================================= CERT* Vendor-Initiated Bulletin VB-98.01 Jan. 16, 1998 Issue Date: Jan. 19, 1998 Topic: CGI Security Hole in EWS1.1 Source: Excite, Inc. To aid in the wide distribution of essential security information, the CERT Coordination Center is forwarding the following information from Excite, Inc. Excite, Inc. urges you to act on this information as soon as possible. Excite, Inc. contact information is included in the forwarded text below; please contact them if you have any questions or need further information. =======================FORWARDED TEXT STARTS HERE============================ Topic: CGI Security Hole in EWS1.1 Source: Excite, Inc. 555 Broadway, Redwood City, CA 94063 http://www.excite.com Problem: Vulnerability in EWS1.1, Unix and Windows NT platforms I. Description Excite for Web Servers, version 1.1, for Unix and Windows NT platforms, contains a security hole that could allow a malicious user of the software to execute shell commands on the the host system on which EWS has been installed. In situations where the web server is running under a user-id with sufficient access privileges, a hacker could conceivably cause damage to the host system. EWS's search CGI is implemented in Perl and invokes a binary program to actually perform the search against the corpus. The function of the Perl CGI is to parse the results from the search engine and render them in HTML. This bug in no way affects Excite.com, anyone visiting or searching Excite.com, any search boxes (for example, those on the Netscape and Microsoft sites) that point to Excite.com, or sites that the Excite spider indexes. II. Impact Because a search entered by a user into the web page is passed as command line argument to the search binary, and because the command line is interpreted by the shell before the search binary is invoked, it is possible for a hacker with sufficient know-how to craft a search that could cause commands embedded in the search string to be invoked on the host system. III. Solution IMPORTANT: Please note that if you have obtained patches from Excite or a third party site prior to 1/16/98, you do not have the most recent version of the patch. Please visit the patches page referenced below to obtain the latest vresion of the patches, which have evaluated and tested internally, as well as by CERT (http://www.cert.org). The security hole can be corrected by replacing single Perl library file that is part of the EWS1.1 distribution. There are two new versions of this file available at http://www.excite.com/navigate/patches.html. One version is for Unix platforms, the other is for Windows NT platforms. Changes are confined to two subroutines within the architext_query.pl library file. The subroutines in question are 'MakeQuery' and 'MakeGather'. To apply the patch, simply replace the file architext_query.pl, which appears in the 'perllib' subdirectory of the EWS installation, with one of the files posted at the URL provided above. Note that comments at the top of the file indicate which operating system it is intended for, either Unix platforms, or Windows NT platforms. For Unix platforms, the changes made to these routines invoke the search binaries using Perl's 'exec', which calls C's execvp(3), thus bypassing any shell processing of the command. By avoiding shell processing of the command, the security hole is closed and prevents any attacks using shell-based hacking. It is not possible to use the same solution in the Windows NT implementation of Perl, so the patch for Windows NT takes a different approach, by defining a set of legal characters for a search string, and then 'sanitizing' the string by removing any characters that are not members of the set of legal characters. For more information, please visit http://www.excite.com/navigate. ========================FORWARDED TEXT ENDS HERE============================= If you believe that your system has been compromised, contact the CERT Coordination Center or your representative in the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST). See http://www.first.org/team-info/. We strongly urge you to encrypt any sensitive information you send by email. The CERT Coordination Center can support a shared DES key and PGP. Contact the CERT staff for more information. Location of CERT PGP key ftp://ftp.cert.org/pub/CERT_PGP.key CERT Contact Information - ------------------------ Email cert () cert org Phone +1 412-268-7090 (24-hour hotline) CERT personnel answer 8:30-5:00 p.m. EST (GMT-5)/EDT(GMT-4), and are on call for emergencies during other hours. Fax +1 412-268-6989 Postal address CERT Coordination Center Software Engineering Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890 USA CERT publications, information about FIRST representatives, and other security-related information are available from http://www.cert.org/ ftp://ftp.cert.org/pub/ CERT advisories and bulletins are also posted on the USENET newsgroup comp.security.announce To be added to our mailing list for CERT advisories and bulletins, send your email address to cert-advisory-request () cert org In the subject line, type SUBSCRIBE your-email-address * Registered U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The CERT Coordination Center is part of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The SEI is sponsored by the U. S. Department of Defense. This file: ftp://ftp.cert.org/pub/cert_bulletins/VB-98.01.excite -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBNMNixnVP+x0t4w7BAQGhzAQAyRdwAPi1sxsWMI7yukeBdm+P5bs/rNou IlYgCBwBbfHKR9n7pWPQ1hN74O/p88vstI3jZGUiFg79yw1YUrxX1pV6FnoG7YLb 5w9p2qyoXUyEPHCZbYWyyzHoXwE2FUh4UGWu/1lc/4pSOhrLHIsJaWWG77sZzIQv AKdyqH6+SE8= =nvb7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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