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#1 Pointer Dereference Vulnerability

open-fixed
None
7
2003-10-10
2003-10-03
Anonymous
No

Submitted by Matthew Murphy (mattmurphy)

Pointer Dereference Vulnerability in Savant Web Server

Savant Web Server offers support for HTTP/1.0 POST
requests for dynamic content. A vulnerability has been
discovered in the server that may cause it to crash
when handling POST requests.

Savant dynamically allocates POST buffers based on
the "Content-Length" header. Savant fails to check the
validity of the returned memory pointer after allocation.
If an attacker sends a POST request with a Content-
Length header indicating a very long POST entity, the
memory allocation will fail.

Savant then attempts to write to a NULL memory region
while storing the POST body. This results in an access
violation, crashing the web server process:

POST / HTTP/1.0
Content-Length: -1

AAAAAAAA

Savant parses the -1 into an integer value.
0xFFFFFFFF=-1. The memory allocation routines
invoked by Savant treat this as an unsigned integer, and
this is converted to a memory request 4,294,967,295
bytes (4 GB). As this is the entire address space of a
Win32 process, this allocation always fails, resulting in
the crash of the server.

Discussion

  • Nobody/Anonymous

    Logged In: NO

    I have put additional checking of content-length field to
    check that it is non negative, however I still need to figure
    out a way to prevent a massive content-length being
    process. e.g. content-length=4294967295
    Perhaps this can be defined by the user in config.

     
  • Ben Sales

    Ben Sales - 2003-10-03
    • priority: 5 --> 7
    • assigned_to: nobody --> fantastichenein
    • status: open --> open-fixed
     
  • Ben Sales

    Ben Sales - 2003-10-10

    Logged In: YES
    user_id=98485

    I'll keep this bug open for the time being, as I can still see it
    being a problem.

     
  • Ben Sales

    Ben Sales - 2003-10-10
    • status: open-fixed --> open-postponed
     
  • Ben Sales

    Ben Sales - 2003-10-10
    • status: open-postponed --> open-fixed
     
  • Ben Sales

    Ben Sales - 2003-10-10

    Logged In: YES
    user_id=98485

    I'll keep this bug open for the time being, as I can still see it
    being a problem.

     
  • Ben Sales

    Ben Sales - 2003-10-10

    Logged In: YES
    user_id=98485

    I'll keep this bug open for the time being, as I can still see it
    being a problem.

     

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