Saturday, January 15, 2011

Wireshark updates address vulnerabilities


Wireshark Logo
The Wireshark development team hasreleased version 1.2.14 and 1.4.3 of its open source, cross-platform network protocol analyser. According to the developers, the security updates address a high-risk vulnerability (CVE-2010-4538) that could allow a remote attacker to initiate a denial of service (DoS) attack or possibly execute arbitrary code on a victim's system.

Affecting both the 1.2.x and 1.4.x branches of Wireshark, the issue is reportedly caused by a buffer overflow in ENTTEC (epan/dissectors/packet-enttec.c) – the vulnerability is said to be triggered by injecting a specially crafted ENTTEC DMX packet with Run Length Encoding (RLE) compression. A buffer overflow issue in MAC-LTE has also been resolved in both versions. In version 1.4.3, a vulnerability in the ASN.1 BER dissector that could have caused Wireshark to exit prematurely has been corrected.

All users are encouraged to upgrade to the latest versions. Alternatively, users that are unable to upgrade to the latest releases can disable the affected dissectors by selecting "Analyze", then "Enabled Protocols" from the menu and un-checking "ENTTEC" and "MAC-LTE".

More details about the updates, including a full list of changes, can be found in the 1.2.14 and 1.4.3 release notes. Wireshark binaries for Windows and Mac OS X, as well as the source code, are available to download and documentation is provided. Wireshark, formerly known as Ethereal, is licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public Licence (GPLv2).


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