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Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam Spamhunter UTF encoding error

Vulnerability Note VU#697598

Original Release Date: 2005-01-05 | Last Revised: 2005-01-05

Overview

Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam Spamhunter crashes when trying to convert certain valid character sets to UTF, resulting in a denial-of-service condition.

Description

Brightmail Anti-Spam Spamhunter is a spam filter designed for corporate environments. The Brightmail Anti-Spam Spamhunter module cannot parse the following character sets:

    • ISO-8859-10 (Latin 6)
    • ISO-8859-13 (Latin 7)
    • ISO-8859-15 (Nordic)
    • CP866 (Russian)

According to the notes included with Spamhunter Patch 132:

The character converters used by the Spamhunter and Language ID modules do not recognize certain valid character encoding sets, specifically ISO-8859-10, ISO-8859-13, ISO-8859-15 (nordic), and CP866 (russian). Previously, these modules assumed that a valid encoding meant the converter would recognize the character set. In the case of ISO-8859-10, when the converter did not recognize the character set, a crash would result.

Impact

If a remote attacker supplies the Brightmail Anti-Spam Spamhunter with a specially crafted email that is encoded with one of the character sets Spamhunter cannot parse (see list above), that attacker may be able to crash the service resulting in a denial-of-service condition.

Solution

Apply Patch


Symantec has released a Patch 132 to correct this issue.

Vendor Information

697598
 

Symantec Corporation Affected

Updated:  December 23, 2004

Status

Affected

Vendor Statement

We have not received a statement from the vendor.

Vendor Information

The vendor has not provided us with any further information regarding this vulnerability.

Addendum

Symantec has released a patch to correct this issue, available at:

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/products/sba/sba_60x/updates/Patch132.zip

    The for Patch 132 states:

    Changes included with Patch 132
      10757
      Component: spamhunter module
      Synopsis: spamhunter causes engine core dumps when trying to convert headers to UTF
      Platforms: all
    The character converters used by the Spamhunter and Language ID modules do not recognize certain valid character encoding sets, specifically ISO-8859-10, ISO-8859-13, ISO-8859-15 (nordic), and CP866 (russian). Previously, these modules assumed that a valid encoding meant the converter would recognize the character set. In the case of ISO-8859-10, when the converter did not recognize the character set, a crash would result. Patch 132 fixes this problem by allowing the parser to convert the data only if the converter recognizes the character set,
    and adds recognition for the character sets listed above.

    If you have feedback, comments, or additional information about this vulnerability, please send us email.


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    References

    Acknowledgements

    This vulnerability was publicly reported by Symantec.

    This document was written by Jeff Gennari.

    Other Information

    CVE IDs: None
    Severity Metric: 3.00
    Date Public: 2004-12-17
    Date First Published: 2005-01-05
    Date Last Updated: 2005-01-05 21:16 UTC
    Document Revision: 62

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