Bug 643453 (CVE-2010-3843)

Summary:	CVE-2010-3843 ettercap: insecure global settings file
Product:	[Other] Security Response	Reporter:	Vincent Danen <vdanen>
Component:	vulnerability	Assignee:	Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status:	CLOSED ERRATA	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified	CC:	ago, gwync
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Security
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:	ettercap 0.7.5	Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2013-01-10 18:15:04 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:	643454, 709422, 709423
Bug Blocks:

Description Vincent Danen 2010-10-15 16:42:18 UTC

Dan Rosenberg reported [1] the following vulnerability in Ettercap-GTK:

The GTK version of ettercap uses a global settings file
at /tmp/.ettercap_gtk and does not verify ownership of this
file.  When parsing this file for settings in gtkui_conf_read()
(src/interfaces/gtk/ec_gtk_conf.c), an unchecked sscanf() call allows a
maliciously placed settings file to overflow a statically-sized buffer
on the stack.  Stack-smashing protection catches it, but it still should
be fixed.

Verify with:
$ perl -e 'print "A"x500' > /tmp/.ettercap_gtk && ettercap -G

Firstly, the settings file should not be globally accessible without
checking ownership, which still gets hairy because an attacker could
create a symlink or hard link to a victim-controlled file (unless you're
using YAMA :p).  The best thing would probably be to keep this file in
the user's home directory instead.

Secondly, parsing configuration files should be robust against malformed
input and not susceptible to trivial buffer overflows.


This issue has been assigned the name CVE-2010-3843 [2].

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ettercap/+bug/656347
[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.oss.general/3660

Comment 1 Vincent Danen 2010-10-15 16:43:30 UTC

Created ettercap tracking bugs for this issue

Affects: fedora-all [bug 643454]

Comment 2 Vincent Danen 2011-05-31 17:16:59 UTC

This also affects ettercap in EPEL4 and 5.

Comment 3 Vincent Danen 2011-05-31 17:17:45 UTC

Created ettercap tracking bugs for this issue

Affects: epel-4 [bug 709422]
Affects: epel-5 [bug 709423]

Comment 4 Agostino Sarubbo 2013-01-10 15:48:13 UTC

this is fixed in 0.7.5

Comment 5 Vincent Danen 2013-01-10 18:15:04 UTC

0.7.5 is currently in all supported releases of Fedora.  This is fixed in EPEL6 via 0.7.4-2.el6 and EPEL5 via 0.7.3-20.el5 and was also patched in Fedora 16 via 0.7.4-3.fc16.

Comment 6 Martin Prpič 2014-05-22 10:32:20 UTC

Just a note that the fix for this issue also resolves CVE-2010-3844, which was the "incorrect parsing of configuration files" from the original report.