Re: Novell Pandora Hack

[thegnome () NMRC ORG (Simple Nomad)]

On Mon, 12 Apr 1999, Jeremy M. Guthrie wrote:

> I had a friend show me the Novell TID: 2941119 about what Novell calls the
> "Pandora Hack".  I suggests patching Netware to at least SP5 and setting
> client/server signatures to 3.  I was under the impression that the
> signature fix did not take care of the issue.  Comments????  It looks like
> Novell wants you to see the error messages... then figure out a
> corrective action against the attacker.  Or I could be on crack.

I thought crack ran on Unix...;-)

There are two things you need to do to stop the Pandora attacks from
succeeding - load up the correct DS.NLM (hence the SP5B fix), and have SET
NCP PACKET SIGNATURE OPTION=3 somewhere before this NLM loads. Putting the
SET statement at the beginning of either the STARTUP.NCF and AUTOEXEC.NCF
is fine. I'd also recommend binding protocols to cards last.

The client packet signature settings must be on at least 1 (which is the
default) otherwise you will not be able to log in. This means proper
protection from Pandora will involve updating any stone age client
software.

That error is supposed to be there anyway -- that was the original
problem, you could bypass all of the signature stuff and NCP spoof your
way onto the server with elevated privs.

Yes the default out of the box settings on Netware 4.x leaves you
vulnerable to attack. By default Netware 5 uses IP instead of IPX, but of
course Novell's IP stack is susceptable to sequence prediction so you
stand the same theoretical risk (Pandora is IPX-based only).

Of course spoofing the source of a Pandora attack can have other effects
with these security measures in place, since you could fill up the SYS
volume (stopping all server processing) with "invalid security signature"
messages. There is no "last message repeated 200,000 times" log entry in
Netware....

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