Full Disclosure mailing list archives

Re: Multiple pServ Remote Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities


From: es () hush com
Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2002 06:31:26 -0800


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Dear Matthew,

Good job on this.  Please come to #!electronicsouls on efnet for an
interview.  We are looking for a new head to our XSS division.

The Electronic Souls Crew
[ElectronicSouls] (c) 2002

"We will blow you in the water."

On Fri, 29 Nov 2002 23:11:03 -0800 Matthew Murphy <mattmurphy () kc rr com> wrote:
There are multiple buffer overflow bugs in pServ that could lead
to a remote
(root?) compromise of public servers running the daemon:

ABSTRACT

Pico Server (pServ) is a freeware web server available at
pserv.sourceforge.net running on many POSIX compliant platforms.
The
package contains several exploitable buffer overflow errors that
may allow
remote attackers to gain the privileges of the web server userid.
As pServ
has no setuid capability, this is typically uid=0/gid=0 (root).

DESCRIPTION

pServ reads in a 1024 byte line each time from the socket.  After
this
occurs, several flaws in intermediate processing allow attackers
to overrun
internal buffers used by the server.  This document assumes that
the Unix
newline (0x0A or '\n') is used.

* One Byte Overflow in Stream Reading
pServ allocates 1024 bytes for a string buffer on the stack, and
then
attempts to read the full size of the block.  It is possible to
zero a
single byte of EBP (x86) by sending a TCP stream message that is
exactly
1024 bytes in length to the server.

* Request method buffer overrun
pServ accepts 1024 bytes in each line of the request, but then only
allocates 16 bytes (according to the definition of "request.method"
in
main.h) for this data, so a request like:

[buffer] / HTTP/1.0

will overwrite 1008 bytes of memory, and possibly allow for arbitrary
code
execution, as this structure is stored on the stack.

In main.c:analyzeRequest():

   /* first line: method, path and protocol version */
   i = j = 0;
   while (reqArray[0][i] != ' ' && reqArray[0][i] != '\0')
       reqStruct->method[j++] = reqArray[0][i++]; <--- No check
of 'method'
index
   reqStruct->method[i] = '\0';
   i++;

* HTTP version specifier buffer overrun
pServ only allocates a 16 byte buffer for "request.protocolVersion"
in
main.h, and then proceeds to copy the remaining data on the request
line
into this small buffer, so:

GET / HTTP/1.[buffer]

will corrupt a 1008 byte range of memory.

In main.c:analyzeRequest():

   j = 0;
     while (reqArray[0][i] != ' ' && reqArray[0][i] != '\0')

       reqStruct->protocolVersion[j++] = reqArray[0][i++]; <---
index of
'j' not checked
   reqStruct->protocolVersion[j] = '\0';

* User-Agent buffer overrun
pServ only allocates a 256 byte buffer for a string that can be
as large as
1011 bytes, allowing for the corruption of 755 bytes of stack data
in the
server process:

GET / HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: [buffer]

In main.c:analyzeRequest():

       if (!strncmp(reqArray[i], "User-Agent:", strlen("User-Agent:")))
           strcpy(reqStruct->userAgent, &reqArray[i][strlen("User-
Agent:
")]);

* Possible request parsing buffer overflow
pServ allows 1024 bytes to be read from a line, but it then tries
to merge
the file path buffer (which can be as large as 1024 bytes, hypothetically)
and the document root buffer (which is given the same size), resulting
in a
possible overflow.  If we look at the bare minimum for an HTTP 1.0
GET
request:

GET / HTTP/1.0[\n]

This gives us 1010 bytes for the file path.  If the document root
is 14
bytes or larger, memory may be corrupted.  The server may also append
the
default file name, which could result in denial of service if the
buffer is
overrun by this concatenation.

In main.c:handleMethod():

           strcpy(completeFilePath, homePath); <--- the buffer
could
already be full!
           strcat(completeFilePath, req.documentAddress); <---
overflow
    ...
               strcat(completeFilePath, defaultFileName);

ANALYSIS

Buffer overflows are a chronic security problem for many vendors.
There are
three things that make these buffer overflows more severe than some
others:

1) Application must run root/setuid (Privileged ports)
2) Remote/Daemon
3) Multiple vulnerabilities

These overflows ALL occur on the stack, and all therefore can be
easily used
to overwrite EBP/EIP and cause the daemon to SEGV or execute arbitrary
code.

DETECTION

Vulnerabilities discovered during source code analysis of pServ
2.0b5.

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