Check Point Advisories

SpamAssassin Malformed Email Header Denial Of Service (CVE-2005-1266)

Vulnerability
Protection

Check Point Reference:	CPAI-2005-261
Date Published:	11 Nov 2009
Severity:	High
Last Updated:	Wednesday 11 November, 2009
Source:
Industry Reference:	CVE-2005-1266
Protection Provided by:	Security Gateway R81, R80, R77, R75
Who is Vulnerable?
Vulnerability Description	SpamAssassin is an open source Email filtering product developed using Perl. The product supports a number of filtering methods such as header fields and body phrase identification, white and black list rules. The product is also embedded in numerous commercial anti-spam products from a broad range of vendors. There exists a remote denial of service vulnerability in Apache SpamAssassin. The vulnerability is caused due to improper handling of the Email headers. An attacker can exploit the vulnerability to cause extremely long delays in Email delivery. A single successful attack will make the affected product consumes 100% CPU resource for a significant period of time. The target returns to normal state after the processing of the crafted Email is finished. If the attacker keeps sending malicious Email messages to the target, a denial-of-service will occur on the target.

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 SpamAssassin Malformed Email Header 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: SMTP Protection Violation.
Attack Information: SpamAssassin malformed Email header denial of service