Check Point Advisories

Sendmail SMTP Timeout Buffer Overflow (CVE-2006-0058)

Vulnerability
Protection

Check Point Reference:	CPAI-2006-209
Date Published:	24 Mar 2010
Severity:	Critical
Last Updated:	Wednesday 24 March, 2010
Source:
Industry Reference:	CVE-2006-0058
Protection Provided by:	Security Gateway R81, R80, R77, R75
Who is Vulnerable?
Vulnerability Description	Sendmail is a very popular Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) program that is typically used by medium to large size organizations and Internet Service Providers to send, accept, and relay e-mail. The program uses the SMTP protocol, defined in RFC 821, to communicate with clients when performing these tasks. There exists a race condition vulnerability which may potentially result in memory corruption in the Sendmail Mail Transfer Agent. The vulnerability is caused due to an improper handling of concurrent events when timeout conditions occur during the transfer of email messages. An unauthenticated remote attacker may leverage this vulnerability in order to execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable host. In an attack case where code injection is not successful, the process serving the attacker's connection may terminate. The Sendmail services and other SMTP sessions are not affected. In case of an attack where code injection is successful, the behavior of the target is entirely dependent on the intended function of the injected code. The code in such a case would execute within the security context of the Sendmail process.

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 Sendmail SMTP Timeout Buffer Overflow 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: Sendmail SMTP timeout buffer overflow