Check Point Advisories

FreeRADIUS Illegal Attributes Denial of Service (CVE-2004-0938)

Vulnerability
Protection

Check Point Reference:	CPAI-2004-177
Date Published:	8 Dec 2009
Severity:	High
Last Updated:	Monday 30 September, 2013
Source:
Industry Reference:	CVE-2004-0938
Protection Provided by:	Security Gateway R81, R80, R77, R75
Who is Vulnerable?
Vulnerability Description	The RADIUS protocol is used for the authentication, authorization and accounting of various network services. RADIUS is most often used by operating systems and hardware devices that provide network access to remote users. There is a large number of RADIUS implementations available, both commercial and open source. FreeRADIUS is an open source implementation of Radius protocol. A vulnerability exists in the way the FreeRADIUS software package handles sequence messages. A specially crafted RADIUS authentication or accounting request can cause a memory exception. This vulnerability may be leveraged by a remote attacker to caseua denial of service condition to the FreeRADIUS server. FreeRADIUS can be configured as a multithreaded single process service, or as a multiprocess fork-on-connect service. In a multithreaded process, the server crashes. When using a multiprocess configuration, the vulnerability is triggered before the server has a chance to spawn a child process to handle the connection. Therefore, in all cases a complete denial of service will follow a successful attack.

Protection Overview

This protection will detect and block attempts to exploit this vulnerability

In order for the protection to be activated, update your Security Gateway product to the latest IPS update. For information on how to update IPS, go to SBP-2006-05, click on Protection tab and select the version of your choice.

Security Gateway R80 / R77 / R75

In the IPS tab, click Protections and find the FreeRADIUS Illegal Attributes Denial of Service protection using the Search tool and Edit the protection's settings.
Install policy on all Security Gateways.

This protection's log will contain the following information:

Attack Name: Application Servers Protection Violation.
Attack Information: FreeRADIUS illegal attributes denial of service