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iDEFENSE Security Advisory 02.27.03: 
https://www.idefense.com/advisory/02.27.03.txt
TCPDUMP Denial of Service Vulnerability in ISAKMP Packet Parsing
February 27, 2003

I. BACKGROUND

TCPDUMP is a widely used network debugging tool that prints out the
headers of packets on a network interface that match a boolean expression.
More information about the application is available at
https://www.tcpdump.org .  

II. DESCRIPTION

A vulnerability exists in the parsing of ISAKMP packets (UDP port 500)
that allows an attacker to force TCPDUMP into an infinite loop upon
receipt of a specially crafted packet. 

The following output is from TCPDUMP replaying a previously captured
malformed ISAKMP packet: 

# tcpdump -vvvr tcpdump_isakmp_inf_loop | head 05:14:57.954719
192.168.2.243.isakmp > 192.168.2.243.isakmp: isakmp 8.9 msgid 7d380dee
cookie 773b4e8a1618caa8->51efacc0a65e0334: phase 2/others ? #69[C]:
    (#83)
    (#237)
    (#237)
    (#237)
    (#237)
    (#237)
    (#237)
    (#237)
    (#237)
    ... 

The string "(#237)" will continue to print indefinitely; at this point
TCPDUMP is no longer processing other packets. The vulnerable segment of
code has been narrowed down to the following loop from
print_isakmp.c:isakmp_sub_print(), the while() loop is never broken as the
variable 'np' never equates to zero: 

while (np) {
    safememcpy(&e, ext, sizeof(e));

    if (ep < (u_char *)ext + ntohs(e.len)) {
        printf(" [|%s]", NPSTR(np));
        cp = ep + 1;
        break;
    }
    depth++;
    printf("\n");
    for (i = 0; i < depth; i++)
        printf("    ");
    printf("(");
    cp = isakmp_sub0_print(np, ext, ep, phase, doi, proto);
    printf(")");
    depth--;

    np = e.np;
    ext = (struct isakmp_gen *)cp;
}  

III. ANALYSIS

Any remote user can generate a specially crafted packet that will cause
TCPDUMP to enter an infinite loop thereby rendering the application
useless and preventing the administrator from viewing network traffic.
Attackers can anonymously trigger this vulnerability by spoofing the
source address of the malicious packet, this is possible because it
traverses over the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), a stateless protocol.
While the vulnerability exists specifically in the TCPDUMP code base there
are some applications that utilize code from TCPDUMP or "wrap" around
TCPDUMP, and such applications would also be affected. 

IV. DETECTION

iDEFENSE has confirmed the existence of this vulnerability in TCPDUMP
versions 3.6, 3.6.3, 3.7.1 built against LIBPCAP versions .6 and .7 on
both the Linux and FreeBSD platform.  Many other Linux distributions
contain vulnerable TCPDUMP versions 

V. RECOVERY

An affected application is rendered useless upon entry into the infinite
loop. The application must be restarted to regain normal functionality. 

VI. WORKAROUND

An ad hoc work around that can be implemented until an official vendor
patch has been made available is to simply filter out parsing of packets
destined to TCP or UDP port 500. This will prevent a malformed packet from
affected a vulnerable version of TCPDUMP. The addition of the following
boolean string can be used to accomplish this task: 

[and] dst port not 500 

Where the [and] is optional depending on whether or not additional boolean
expressions are provided.

VII. VENDOR FIX/RESPONSE

This vulnerability was already closed by Guy Harris during routine
development; users of the CVS version downloaded since September 6, 2002
(revision 1.34 of print-isakmp.c) are not vulerable.  The new 3.7.2
tcpdump release includes this and a couple of additional security
fixes; the 0.7.2 libpcap release includes new functionality but no
security fixes.

The following packages are available:

https://www.tcpdump.org/release/tcpdump-3.7.2.tar.gz
https://www.tcpdump.org/release/libpcap-0.7.2.tar.gz


Debian 2.2 (potato) contains tcpdump 3.4a6, which does not appear to be
vulnerable (version 3.4a6 does not include an isakmp dissector). Debian
3.0 (woody) contains tcpdump 3.6.2, which is vulnerable.  Updated packages
are available from https://www.debian.org/security/ .


VIII. CVE INFORMATION

The Mitre Corp.'s Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Project has
assigned the identification number CAN-2003-0108 to this issue.

XI. DISCLOSURE TIMELINE

12/09/2002  Issue disclosed to iDEFENSE
02/25/2003  TCPDUMP maintainers notified: guy_harris@users.sourceforge.net,
    itojun@users.sourceforge.net, mcr@users.sourceforge.net and 
    fenner@users.sourceforge.net
02/25/2003  Responses from Guy Harris, Bill Fenner, Michael Richardson
02/25/2003  iDEFENSE clients notified
02/26/2003  OS vendors notified via vendor-sec@lst.de
02/27/2003  Public Disclosure

X. CREDIT

Andrew Griffiths (andrewg@d2.net.au) is credited with discovering this
vulnerability.


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