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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
 

CVSS Metrics

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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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