Microsoft plugs privilege elevation flaw in SQL Server

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,75167,00.html

By Gillian Law, IDG News Service
OCTOBER 17, 2002

Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server 7.0 and 2000 software both contain a
critical flaw that would allow low-privilege users to elevate their
privilege level and make changes to tasks created by other users, the
company said yesterday.

The two SQL Server versions provide "stored procedures," collections
of Transact-SQL statements that are stored under one name and
processed as a group, Microsoft said. These are normally used for
managing SQL Server and for displaying information about databases and
users.

One of these stored procedures lets users run, delete, insert or
update Web tasks. Web tasks let a Web developer create an Active
Server Page that sends a request to the SQL Server for an HTTP file
containing the data it needs.

Normally, only administrators and database operators should be able to
do this, but currently lower-privilege users can do so.

An attacker, if able to authenticate to the server as a low-privilege
user, could take advantage of this to delete, insert or change the Web
tasks created by other users. The attacker could also run previously
created tasks in the context of the creator of those tasks.

The attacker would need to be an authenticated user of the system and
could change or run only existing Web tasks, not create new ones,
Microsoft said.

A patch for the flaw is posted on Microsoft's TechNet Web site.



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