SUSE-SA:2002:042: KDE lanbrowser vulnerability

Description

During a security review, the SUSE security team has found two vulnerabilities in the KDE lanbrowsing service.

LISa is used to identify CIFS and other servers on the local network, and consists of two main modules: "lisa", a network daemon, and "reslisa", a restricted version of the lisa daemon. LISa can be accessed in KDE using the URL type "lan://", and resLISa using the URL type "rlan://".

LISA will obtain information on the local network by looking for an existing LISA server on other local hosts, and if there is one, it retrieves the list of servers from it. If there is no other LISA server, it will scan the network itself.

SUSE Linux can be configured to run the lisa daemon at system boot time. The daemon is not started by default, however.

The first vulnerability found is a buffer overflow in the lisa daemon, and can be exploited by an attacker on the local network to obtain root privilege on a machine running the lisa daemon. It is not exploitable on a default installation of SUSE Linux, because the lisa daemon is not started by default.

The second vulnerability is a buffer overflow in the lan:// URL handler. It can possibly be exploited by remote attackers to gain access to the victim user's account, for instance by causing the user to follow a bad lan:// link in a HTML document.

This update provides fixes for SUSE Linux 7.2 and 7.3. Previous updates already corrected the vulnerability in SUSE Linux 8.0, and SUSE Linux 8.1 contains the fix already.

Please download the update package for your distribution and verify its integrity by the methods listed in section 3) of this announcement. Then, install the package using the command "rpm -Fhv file.rpm" to apply the update. Our maintenance customers are being notified individually. The packages are being offered to install from the maintenance web.