Symantec Altiris Deployment Solution dbmanager Denial of Service

SUMMARY

Symantec's Altiris Deployment Solution is susceptible to a denial of service which can temporarily halt deployment solution activity. An attacker would need to be on the network segment to effectively implement the denial of service.

AFFECTED PRODUCTS

Product

|

Version

|

Build

|

Solution(s)

—|—|—|—

Symantec Altiris Deployment Solution

|

6.9.x

|

All

|

DS 6.9 SP4

ISSUES

Severity

Medium

Remote Access

|

Yes (adjacent network)

—|—

Local Access

|

No

Authentication Required

|

No

Exploit publicly available

|

No

MITIGATION

Details

Symantec is aware of the public release of information concerning a denial of service attack against the Symantec Altiris Deployment Solution. An attacker with access to the local network and working knowledge of Symantec Altiris Deployment Solution request formats could potentially pass specially crafted requests to the dbmanager.exe listening port. Successful exploitation would result in dereferencing invalid memory causing the targeted Deployment Solution application to crash. Such a crash would temporarily halt deployment solution tasks until a restart is initiated.

Symantec Response

Symantec engineers have verified this finding and released updates to resolve this issue. Symantec is not aware of any customer impact from this issue.

Symantec Deployment Solution SP4 is currently available for update through the FileConnect -Electronic Software Distribution web site.

Mitigations

Symantec Security Response has released IPS signature,

23661 - TCP Symantec Altiris DBManager DOS

that detects and blocks attempts to exploit this issue. Signatures are available through normal Symantec updates.

Best Practices

As part of normal best practices, Symantec strongly recommends:

• Restrict access to administration or management systems to privileged users.
• Restrict remote access, if required, to trusted/authorized systems only.
• Run under the principle of least privilege where possible to limit the impact of exploit by threats.
• Keep all operating systems and applications updated with the latest vendor patches.
• Follow a multi-layered approach to security. Run both firewall and anti-malware applications, at a minimum, to provide multiple points of detection and protection to both inbound and outbound threats.
• Deploy network and host-based intrusion detection systems to monitor network traffic for signs of anomalous or suspicious activity. This may aid in detection of attacks or malicious activity related to exploitation of latent vulnerabilities

REFERENCES

Security Focus, http://www.securityfocus.com, has assigned Bugtraq ID (BID) 38410 to this issue for inclusion in the SecurityFocus vulnerability database.

This issue is a candidate for inclusion in the CVE list (http://cve.mitre.org), which standardizes names for security problems. CVE-2010-0109 has been assigned to this issue.