OSEC

Neohapsis is currently accepting applications for employment. For more information, please visit our website www.neohapsis.com or email hr@neohapsis.com
Bugtraq archives for 3rd quarter (Jul-Sep) 1998: Re: Long attachment filename exploits: a procmail filter

Re: Long attachment filename exploits: a procmail filter

John D. Hardin (jhardinWOLFENET.COM)
Wed, 29 Jul 1998 20:05:45 -0700 

On Wed, 29 Jul 1998, Brett Glass wrote:

> This recipe is a great start! However, there are a few potential improvements.

Fire away!

> First, it doesn't recognize tabs as whitespace or handle optional
> whitespace in a few places where MIME would allow it.

I fixed that - thanks for pointing it out. Please grab the
html-trap.procmail snippet again and take a look.

> Second, it invokes Perl on any message with a MIME attachment, which
> could slow the mail server greatly. It would be preferable to detect the
> exploit in procmail and only invoke Perl to "cleanse" the message if
> that were necessary.

Not so. It uses procmail REs to detect long filenames and executable
filenames, and only calls perl to sanitiza them if they are found.

> Alternatively, it could redirect the mail to the postmaster so he or she
> would know that users were under attack.

Hmm. That would be simple a matter of adding

    :0c
    ! postmaster

to the block that calls perl - before (unsanitized) or after (sanitized)
perl cleans the message would be a judgement call.

Alternatively you could send the entire message as an attachment - that
might be better. Could someone give me an action that will take the
message being processed and mail it as a MIME attachment to postmaster?
I'm not very familiar with formail.

> Finally, there are other possible exploits, like a very long content
> type, that might also lead to buffer oveflows in mail clients. These
> should be checked too.

If you can give me an example, I'll be glad to add a trap for it. I'll
take a shot at it without a sample, but it might not be too good.

> Can people suggest improvements to John's recipes that solve these
> problems? Greg Sutter and Chris Lindsey have both come up with patterns
> that do more of the matching within procmail, but they still need a
> little refinement.
>
> In any event, this is a great start. It's fantastic that someone who had
> most of the needed recipe already written was on the list.... This is
> what's great about the Net!

...and that I also lurk on bugtraq and ntbugtraq... :)

--
 John Hardin KA7OHZ                               jhardinwolfenet.com
 pgpk -a finger://gonzo.wolfenet.com/jhardin    PGP key ID: 0x41EA94F5
 PGP key fingerprint: A3 0C 5B C2 EF 0D 2C E5  E9 BF C8 33 A7 A9 CE 76
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Your mouse has moved. Windows NT must be restarted for the change
  to take effect. Reboot now?  [ OK ]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
   88 days until Daylight Savings Time ends