Bugtraq mailing list archives

ftpd: the advisory version


From: lamagra () HACKERMAIL NET (Lamagra Argamal)
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 09:18:22 -0000


You might have seen the wuftpd exploit by tf8, he released it in his own lame way. But now I bring you the story behind 
it.

The story begins inside the ftpcmd.y file. Which has the ftp commands in it. 
The bug is in the site_exec(char *cmd) function. There is calls lreply(200,cmd); 
In ftpd.c we find 

void lreply(int n, char *fmt,...)
....
vreply(USE_REPLY_LONG, n, fmt, ap)
...

and
void vreply(long flags, int n, char *fmt, va_list ap) 
...
vsnprintf(buf + (n ? 4 : 0), n ? sizeof(buf) - 4 : sizeof(buf), fmt, ap)
....

cmd becomes fmt with vsnprintf that's bad. The idea is to put in formatstrings to get some extra priviledges. 
We can use %n to overwrite some stuff. eg. overwrite a ret-address or a null at the end of a buffer (cause an overflow) 
or change the configuration or uid like I did in my proftp exploit (check proftp_pcc.c on Packetstorm).

There are some other bugs in site_exec like
    for (t = cmd; *t && !isspace(*t); t++) {
        if (isupper(*t)) {
            *t = tolower(*t);
        }
    }

Sanitizing stops at a space?? (good thing I didn't tell you this, eh tf8)

Wuftpd is all really buggy code. I prefer proftpd, it has clean, readable code and it's quite secure. 
I did some checking and found some minor bugs there too

First in modules/mod_pam.c
 /* Allocate our entries...we don't free this because PAM does this for us.
   */
  pam_user = malloc(strlen(cmd->argv[0]) + 1);
  if(pam_user == (char *)0)
    return pam_return_type ? ERROR(cmd) : DECLINED(cmd);
  sstrncpy(pam_user, cmd->argv[0], strlen(cmd->argv[0]) + 1);

  pam_pass = malloc(strlen(cmd->argv[1]) + 1);

Pam doesn't free these according to me. So this could lead to a pottential system DoS if abused. Fortunatly proftpd has 
a limit of 3 on USER/PASS.

Second:
In the set_proc_title(char *fmt,...) function in main.c
It constructs a buffer with hostname + user + cmd to replace argv[0]. If setproctitle(char *fmt,...) is available (only 
on debian and bsd). 
It calls setproctitle(statsbuf); what re-opens the old bug
Not a big thing since almost nobody has it.

-lamagra
http://lamagra.seKure.de
http://roothat.labs.pulltheplug.com

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