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Critical Kerberos Flaw Revealed

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the locking-down-the-network dept.

doi writes "ZD Net is carrying a story about '...a critical flaw that could allow hackers to circumvent the secure networking system...The problem lies with software in MIT Kerberos 5 called kadmind4 (Kerberos v4 compatibility administration daemon), which allows compatibility with older administrative clients. A buffer stack overflow allows an attacker to use a specially formed request to gain access to the KDC with the privileges of a user running kadmind4.' It affects all MIT-derived versions of Kerberos 4 and 5."

4 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. it is only MIT Specific � by norwoodites · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That means it does not hurt the opensource version of Kerberos V, heimdal because it does not support Kerberos IV which is supported by KTH.

  2. Re:M$FT too? by dknj · · Score: 2, Interesting

    actually this is the first question that popped into my head. definitely not flamebait. hopefully microsoft butchered it enough that they're not affected?

    -dk

  3. Re:Nawww.... by octogen · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd recommend having a separate data stacks and address stacks, or some kind of hardware-supported pointer protection (for example, IBM's AS/400s have hardware pointer protection for certain kinds of pointers, therefore you can't fake these pointers by overwriting them with data)

  4. How do they find these? by Fyndlorn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm curious to know how these buffer overflow exploits are typically found? Does somebody go through the source (if ineed it is avaiable) and look for potential buffers to overflow? Or is it more like they go through the whole inerface to the thing and check everywhere where they can give some input and see if thy can cause an overflow that way?