Ethereal: Buffer overflow in OSPF protocol dissector

Background

Ethereal is a feature-rich network protocol analyzer. It provides protocol analyzers for various network flows, including one for Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) Interior Gateway Protocol.

Description

iDEFENSE reported a possible overflow due to the lack of bounds checking in the dissect_ospf_v3_address_prefix() function, part of the OSPF protocol dissector.

Impact

An attacker might be able to craft a malicious network flow that would crash Ethereal. It may be possible, though unlikely, to exploit this flaw to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running Ethereal, which could be the root user.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Ethereal users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=net-analyzer/ethereal-0.10.13-r2"