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Cisco Various Products Compressed DNS Messages Denial of Service

  • From: Fergie (Paul Ferguson)
  • Date: Tue May 24 11:07:58 2005

Apologies for responding to my own post, but Secunia
has released more details on this vulnerability alert,
specifically:

[snip]

A vulnerability has been reported in various Cisco products, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the DNS implementation during the decompression of compressed DNS messages and can be exploited via a specially crafted DNS packet containing invalid information in the compressed section.

Successful exploitation crashes a vulnerable device or causes it to function abnormally.

The vulnerability affects the following products:
* Cisco IP Phones 7902/7905/7912
* Cisco ATA (Analog Telephone Adaptor) 186/188
* Cisco Unity Express

The following Cisco ACNS (Application and Content Networking System) devices are also affected:
* Cisco 500 Series Content Engines
* Cisco 7300 Series Content Engines
* Cisco Content Routers 4400 series
* Cisco Content Distribution Manager 4600 series
* Cisco Content Engine Module for Cisco 2600, 2800, 3600, 3700, and 3800 series Integrated Service Routers.

Solution:
See patch matrix in vendor advisory for information about fixes.
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sn-20050524-dns.shtml#software

Provided and/or discovered by:
NISCC credits Dr. Steve Beaty.

Original Advisory:
Cisco:
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sn-20050524-dns.shtml

NISCC:
http://www.niscc.gov.uk/niscc/docs/al-20050524-00433.html

[snip]

http://secunia.com/advisories/15472/

- ferg



-- "Fergie (Paul Ferguson)" <[email protected]> wrote:

UNIRAS (UK Gov CERT)/NISCC:
http://www.niscc.gov.uk/niscc/docs/al-20050524-00433.html

[snip]


Summary
- -------
A vulnerability affecting the Domain Name System (DNS)
protocol was identified by Dr. Steve Beaty from the
Department of Mathematical and Computer Science of
Metropolitan State College of Denver.

The Domain Name System (DNS) protocol is an Internet
service that translates domain names into Internet Protocol
(IP) addresses. Because domain names are alphabetic,
they're easier to remember, however the Internet is
really based on IP addresses; hence every time a domain
name is requested, a DNS service must translate the name
into the corresponding IP address.

The vulnerability concerns the recursion process used by
some DNS implementations to decompress compressed DNS
messages. Under certain circumstances, it is possible to
cause the DNS server to terminate abnormally.

All users of applications that support DNS are recommended
to take note of this advisory and carry out any remedial actions
suggested by their vendor(s).

[snip]

- ferg


--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 [email protected] or [email protected]
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/