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Carnegie Mellon University

Software Engineering Institute

CERT Coordination Center

Vandyke Software SecureCRT contains buffer overflow vulnerability in password handling code

Vulnerability Note VU#216227

Original Release Date: 2002-09-16 | Last Revised: 2003-04-15

Overview

SecureCRT is vulnerable to buffer overflow from improper handling of long password input.

Description

SecureCRT is a terminal emulator and SSH client for Windows. If the SSH1 protocol is used and the user enters a password 300 characters or more in length, SecureCRT will crash, with the following error displayed by Windows:

"SECURECRT caused an invalid page fault in module MSVCRT.DLL..."

Since the execution instruction pointer (EIP) register is not overwritten, the crash more likely results from heap overflow than stack overflow.

According to VanDyke Software, the vulnerability does not occur when the SSH2 protocol is used.

Impact

Local users may be able to execute arbitrary code on the client host by supplying a long password to SecureCRT.

Solution

The CERT/CC is currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem.

Vendor Information

216227
 
Expand all

VanDyke Software Inc. Affected

Notified:  January 29, 2002 Updated: August 06, 2002

Status

Affected

Vendor Statement

This vulnerability was addressed in SecureCRT 3.4.2, and all subsequent versions of SecureCRT do not have this problem.

The latest versions of SecureCRT are available from the following locations:

SecureCRT 3.4.6:
http://www.vandyke.com/download/securecrt/index.html

SecureCRT 4.0 beta 3:
http://www.vandyke.com/download/securecrt/beta.html

Vendor Information

The vendor has not provided us with any further information regarding this vulnerability.

Addendum

The CERT/CC has no additional comments at this time.

If you have feedback, comments, or additional information about this vulnerability, please send us email.


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References

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Blackshell Security Advisory for reporting this vulnerability.

This document was written by Shawn Van Ittersum.

Other Information

CVE IDs: None
Severity Metric: 0.06
Date Public: 2001-12-30
Date First Published: 2002-09-16
Date Last Updated: 2003-04-15 14:01 UTC
Document Revision: 11

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