MIT Warns of Critical Vulnerabilities in Kerberos 5
kinrowan writes "MIT, inventor of Kerberos, has announced a pair of vulnerabities in the software that will allow an attacker to either execute a DOS attack or execute code on the machine. Some details of the story are at SearchSecurity as well as ComputerWeekly. Details of the advisories themselves are also available. The vulnerabilities also affect the VPN 3000 line of Cisco VPN concentrators."
These are vulnerabilities in a particular implementation of K5, not in Kerberos itself. I think it's an important distinction.
The Kerberos Dialogue should help explain a little bit about what Kerberos is. I like it because it shows why certain design decisions were made.
I don't believe anyone has mentioned it yet, but so far I haven't heard that the Heimdal Kerberos distribution is affected.
It's pretty complicated to do (compared to the ease of stack based exploits). However, it is possible. This site has a good explanation/example of a double-free exploit(against CVS).
-Aaron