AOL IM 'Away' Message Security Hole Found

thedude13 writes " Infoworld is running a story about a major security hole in AOL ® Instant Messenger(TM) and how it handles away messages. AIM is vulnerable to a buffer overflow via the auto-response away message mechanism. Yet another reason to switch to, IMHO, a better client such as gaim."

Comments

Major erratum in article

[Eponymous Cowboy]

Unfortunately, the article this story links to has a rather large mistake. It states:

However, AIM users would have to click on the URL to trigger the vulnerability, which will make it harder for malicious hackers or virus writers to use it in automated attacks, Weinstein said.

This is completely and totally wrong.

Any web page can launch URLs of the form aim:goaway?message=Anything+goes+here by many different means without user intervention:

• Redirect response codes
  
• Meta redirect tags
  
• Frames
  
• iframes
  
• Javascript popups

Any one of those methods will change your away message automatically, without any confirmation on your part. And if the part in the message= section is more than 1024 characters, arbitrary code can be executed on your machine.

The only sure way to protect yourself against this is to remove the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\aim registry key, which will disable the AIM protocol altogether, as explained here.

Re:Major erratum in article

[Causemos]

Except it appears no one checked this fix out completely. So long as your account has privileges to that area the registry (which many do). AIM re-creates the key the next time you restart it. I've also tried breaking the key and AIM corrects this also.

Basically unless you run as a regular "User" or other restricted account in Windows, the AIM fix is only good for one session of AIM.

Victor

Bugfree OSS

[brianerst]

Thank god there have never been any buffer overflow bugs in Gaim!

We can all sleep better now.

Re:I use Gaim because it's the best in Linux

[the_rev_matt]

I've been using GAIM on XP at work for 4 months now. It has had a total of one problem, when Yahoo changed protocols to screw third party IM clients. Downloaded the new version of GAIM less than 24 hours later and it worked fine.

I have encountered zero bugs with GAIM, which I consider very unusual for anything running on Windows.