Symantec VERITAS Storage Foundation Administration Service DoS Vulnerability

iDefense Security Advisory 06.01.07
http://labs.idefense.com/intelligence/vulnerabilities/ 
June 01, 2007

I. BACKGROUND

The VERITAS Storage Foundation is made up of the Veritas File System,
Veritas Volume Replicator (VVR) products and some other utilities. It
allows virtualization of storage over a variety of platforms, and
contains a remote administration application to configure and monitor
the elements of the storage network. More information can be found at
the following URL.

http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/products/overview.jsp?pcid=1020&pvid=203_1 

II. DESCRIPTION

Remote exploitation of an input validation vulnerability in VERITAS
Software Corp.'s Storage Foundation 4.3 Enterprise Administration
service could allow an unauthenticated attacker to consume excessive
resources or crash the service.

The vulnerability specifically exists in the handling of packets
delivered to the VVR Administration service port, TCP/8199. By sending
specially crafted requests to a vulnerable host, attackers are able to
control the size value for memory allocation. In cases where requests
are made for more memory than the system is able to allocate, the
service attempts to write to an invalid pointer, which crashes the
service. If allocation succeeds, the resulting memory will not be
released until the connection is closed. This allows a resource
consumption denial of service attack.

III. ANALYSIS

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows remote attackers to
cause the affected service to terminate. As no checks are made that the
values given make sense, it is possible to cause the service to
allocate large amounts of memory, potentially causing severely degraded
system performance and instability in other processes.

Crashing the administration service, which is restarted after 60
seconds, would most likely not directly impact the operation of the
replication service itself. However, it likely the resource consumption
variation would prevent the affected system from being usable for the
duration of the attack.

IV. DETECTION

iDefense Labs confirmed that VERITAS Storage Foundation for Windows
version 4.3.01 is vulnerable. It is suspected that all previous
versions of are vulnerable.

V. WORKAROUND

Applying filtering to the affected port, such that only hosts an
administrator uses can access it, will help mitigate exposure to the
vulnerability.

VI. VENDOR RESPONSE

Symantec has addressed this vulnerability with a software update. For
more information consult their advisory at the following URL.

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/security/Content/2007.06.01a.html 

VII. CVE INFORMATION

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) project has assigned the
name CVE-2007-1593 to this issue. This is a candidate for inclusion in
the CVE list (http://cve.mitre.org/), which standardizes names for 
security problems.

VIII. DISCLOSURE TIMELINE

10/11/2006  Initial vendor notification
10/12/2006  Initial vendor response
06/01/2007  Coordinated public disclosure

IX. CREDIT

This vulnerability was reported to iDefense by CIRT.DK. Additionally,
iDefense Labs discovered the ability to consume excessive resources
while researching this vulnerability.

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X. LEGAL NOTICES

Copyright =A9 2007 iDefense, Inc.

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at the time of publishing based on currently available information. Use
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