Overview
Microsoft IIS 4.0, circa March 2000, contained a vulnerability that allowed an intruder to consume unlimited memory on a vulnerable server.
Description
Older versions of IIS 4.0, circa March 2000, contained a vulnerability in the chunked-encoding transfer mechanism that permitted an intruder to allocate unlimited memory on the server. Quoting from Microsoft security bulletin MS00-018: IIS 4.0 supports chunked encoding transfers, but does not limit the size of the buffer that can be reserved. This would allow a malicious user to request an extremely large buffer for a POST or PUT operation, but never actually send data, thereby blocking memory on the server that had been allocated to the session. |
Impact
Intruders can interrupt the ordinary operation of a vulnerable IIS 4.0 server, potentially preventing it from responding to legitimate requests. Additionally, an intruder may be able to degrade the overall performance of other process on the machine. |
Solution
Apply a patch as described in MS00-018. |
Vendor Information
CVSS Metrics
| Group | Score | Vector |
|---|---|---|
| Base | ||
| Temporal | ||
| Environmental |
References
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Petteri Stenius for reporting this vulnerability.
This document was written by Shawn V Hernan based on information provided by Microsoft in MS00-018.
Other Information
| CVE IDs: | CVE-2000-0226 |
| Severity Metric: | 2.62 |
| Date Public: | 2000-03-20 |
| Date First Published: | 2002-06-13 |
| Date Last Updated: | 2002-06-13 18:42 UTC |
| Document Revision: | 3 |