Posted Feb 9, 2007 10:46 UTC (Fri) by malor (subscriber, #2973)
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You know, I don't think I've ever seen ANY other program have as many vulnerabilities as Ethereal/Wireshark. Not even wu-ftpd was that bad.
wireshark: multiple vulnerabilities
Posted Feb 10, 2007 8:09 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
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Fetchmail maybe? Especially if measured in vulns/line of code. :)
I agree, Ethereal/Wireshark has an abysmal security record. I think it's because the protocol decoders are notoriously hard to write, and are written in a brittle, dangerous language by people who tend to be more interested in getting packets decoded rather than long-term, exhaustively tested code.
It would be nice if dissectors could be written in Perl/Ruby/Python/whatever. That would get rid of almost all of the vulns.
Has a Wireshark vulnerability ever been exploited in the wild?
wireshark: multiple vulnerabilities
Posted Feb 15, 2007 15:08 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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Many of the vulnerabilities are DoS attacks, and Perl and Python are just as capable of infinite loops as C.
(The high number of security holes is doubtless because there are so *many* protocol decoders, and they *all* listen to potentially hostile input. wu-ftpd only had one protocol decoder...)
wireshark: multiple vulnerabilities
Posted Feb 15, 2007 21:16 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
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Ah, I didn't realize that they were mostly infinite loops. Try as I might, I just can't get worked up about hostile input causing me to have to fire a ^C at Wireshark. Seems a little rich to call that a DoS, much less a full-on security vulnerability.
wireshark: multiple vulnerabilities
Posted Feb 16, 2007 15:19 UTC (Fri) by jmayer (subscriber, #595)
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> Seems a little rich to call that a DoS, much less a full-on security
vulnerability.
But it is: In several environments tshark (the command line version of
wireshark) is being used to analyze traffic on the fly, create statistics
and (AFAIK) even evaluate the output in some sort of mini-ids. So if you
manage to send wireshark into an infinite loop, then this may easily have
more than just trivial consequences.
Debian Sarge not vulnerable
Posted Feb 25, 2007 18:34 UTC (Sun) by kreutzm (guest, #4700)
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The code for all vulnerabilities is not present in Debian Sarge (ethereal).