McAfee VirusScan vulnerability found, patched

Multibyte character overflow issue breaches on-access defences.

A vulnerability has been reported in the on-access component of

McAfee

‘s flagship

VirusScan

product, which could be used to disable on-access protection and potentially to execute malicious code on a vulnerable system.

The flaw involves a buffer overflow while processing files with exceptionally long filenames which include multibyte characters, commonly used for the representation of East Asian languages. Any attempt by the on-access scanner to check such maliciously-crafter files could cause the overflow and render the scanner inactive, leaving the system open to attack.

The problem was reported to

McAfee

by researchers at

iDefense

in early February, and is now being made public following the release of patches by

McAfee

. The vulnerability is thought to affect products up to version 8.0i patch 11, and users are advised to ensure the most recent patches are applied as soon as possible.

An advisory from

iDefense

is

here

, with more information from

McAfee


here

and a

Secunia

alert

here

.

Posted on 19 April 2007 by

Virus Bulletin