Executive brief
The University of Washington's email server software, which handles incoming and outgoing messages, contains a critical security flaw. An attacker can exploit this weakness over the internet to take complete control of the server without needing a username or password. This could lead to the theft of all hosted emails, a total shutdown of email services, or the use of the server to launch further attacks on the internal network.
Technical details
A classic buffer overflow exists in the University of Washington's implementation of the IMAP and POP3 protocols. The vulnerability is triggered by sending specially crafted, overly long commands or arguments to the listening service. Because the software fails to perform adequate bounds checking on these inputs, an unauthenticated remote attacker can overwrite memory to redirect execution flow. This typically results in arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the service (often root), leading to full system compromise. Patches were released by the vendor and various OS distributors following the initial disclosure in 1997.
Affected products
- University of Washington IMAP server All versions prior to 1997 patches
- University of Washington POP server All versions prior to 1997 patches
Timeline
- 1997-04-07: disclosed: Initial public disclosure of the vulnerability.