search menu icon-carat-right cmu-wordmark

CERT Coordination Center

Clam AntiVirus vulnerable to memory corruption via specially crafted UPX packed file

Vulnerability Note VU#385908

Original Release Date: 2006-01-16 | Last Revised: 2006-01-16

Overview

A vulnerability in the ClamAV antivirus toolkit may allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system.

Description

Clam AntiVirus is an antivirus toolkit for Unix-like systems that is commonly integrated with mail servers for email attachment scanning. It supports a number of different file formats, including the Ultimate Packer for eXecutables (UPX).


A size calculation flaw exists in the way ClamAV handles the unpacking of executable files compressed with UPX. This flaw could result in corruption of heap memory, allowing an attacker to execute code supplied in a specially crafted UPX file.

Impact

A remote unauthenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system. The attacker-supplied code would be executed with the privileges of the running ClamAV process.

Solution

Upgrade

The ClamAV project has released version 0.88 in response to this issue. Users who compile ClamAV from the original source code are encouraged to upgrade to this version.
Users who obtain ClamAV from their operating system vendor are encouraged to review the Systems Affected section of this document for more information.

Vendor Information

385908
 

CVSS Metrics

Group Score Vector
Base
Temporal
Environmental

References

Acknowledgements

Thanks to ClamAV for reporting this vulnerability.

This document was written by Chad R Dougherty.

Other Information

CVE IDs: CVE-2006-0162
Severity Metric: 26.72
Date Public: 2006-01-09
Date First Published: 2006-01-16
Date Last Updated: 2006-01-16 21:01 UTC
Document Revision: 14

Sponsored by CISA.