Check Point Advisories

Mercury Mail Transport System Buffer Overflow (CVE-2005-4411)

Vulnerability
Protection

Check Point Reference:	CPAI-2006-320
Date Published:	13 Jun 2010
Severity:	Critical
Last Updated:	Thursday 12 November, 2015
Source:
Industry Reference:	CVE-2005-4411
Protection Provided by:	Security Gateway R81, R80, R77, R75
Who is Vulnerable?
Vulnerability Description	The Mercury Mail Transport System server is an implementation of an Internet mail server. The product offers services which are implementations of the server side of several protocols such as SMTP, POP3, IMAP and Computing and Communications Services Office Nameserver protocol also know as the Phone Book (Ph) service. A stack buffer overflow vulnerability exists in the Mercury Mail Transport System product. The flaw is created by the lack of proper enforcement of maximum allowable length of user supplied data. This flaw may be exploited by a malicious unauthenticated user to result in arbitrary code execution on the target host. In case of an attack aimed at creating a denial of service condition, the affected Mercury Phone Book Server service and other active services will terminate. Since the services will restart automatically, the termination of the services will only affect the sessions already established during an attack. An attacker may send the crafted request to the server continuously, which will cause a permanent denial of service condition. In case of an attack where code injection and execution is successful, the behavior of the system is dependent on the intended purpose of the injected code. Any code injected into the vulnerable component would execute in the security context of the service process, normally System, thus compromise the whole target system.

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 Mercury Mail Transport System 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: NNTP Protection Violation.
Attack Information: Mercury Mail Transport System buffer overflow