Check Point Advisories

Symantec Norton AntiVirus Stack Exhaustion

Vulnerability
Protection

Check Point Reference:	CPAI-2005-183
Date Published:	14 Feb 2010
Severity:	High
Last Updated:	Sunday 14 February, 2010
Source:
Protection Provided by:	Security Gateway R81, R80, R77, R75
Who is Vulnerable?
Vulnerability Description	Norton AntiVirus is a virus protection solution produced by Symantec corporation. When installed on a system, it installs a number of dynamic libraries and registers several ActiveX controls. A vulnerability has been reported in several Symantec products. One of the dynamic link libraries installed by the vulnerable product contains a remotely scriptable ActiveX object which lacks proper input data validation mechanisms. An attacker may instantiate the vulnerable object and supply malicious input data to its function to cause stack exhaustion. The application directly affected by this vulnerability is Internet Explorer, not the affected Symantec product. However, Internet Explorer forks to a new thread when processing embedded script code. As a result, a successful attack only affects the thread created to process the script code embedded in the HTML document. The main thread is not affected during the attack, therefore no unusual behaviour occurs. A remote code injection and execution attack is not possible using this vulnerability.

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 Symantec Norton AntiVirus Stack Exhaustion 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: Security Products Enforcement Violation.
Attack Information: Symantec Norton AntiVirus stack exhaustion