ZOO archive issues hit security vendors

Errors handling rare format patched by four AV and anti-spam products.

A researcher has revealed details of flawed implementation of a somewhat archaic archive format, .zoo, which has required patching in several anti-virus products and a popular anti-spam appliance, and also affects some archiving software.

Products from

Avira

,

Alwil

and

Panda

were all patched in late March and early April, as was the

Barracuda Spam Firewall

, after the vendors were informed of the infinite-loop issue by the researcher, Jean-Sebastien Guay-Leroux. In some cases exploitation of the flaw could have been used to cause extremely high processor usage or even denial of service in the security software, leaving systems vulnerable to further attack or blocking mail transfer on affected SMTP servers.

The flaw was first discovered in September last year, and all affected vendors were informed by March 19th. The last vendor to apply a patch,

Alwil

, released its fix in mid-April, and the vulnerability is being made public despite remaining issues with two archivers,

PicoZip

and

WinAce

, which are both affected by the flaw but whose makers have yet to respond to the researcher.

Most users of the affected products should be automatically protected by recent updates, but users are advised to check that they are running the latest versions of their security software at all times to ensure the best possible protection. More details of the flaws, including proof-of-concept exploit code, can be found at the researcher’s site,

here

.

Trend Micro

, troubled by a

string of vulnerabilities

in recent months, has also released details of two more buffer-overflow issues, which are thought to be exploitable only from the local system.

Trend

‘s patch releases covering the issues are

here

, advisories from the

Zero Day Initiative

are

here

and

here

, and a

Secunia

alert is

here

.

Posted on 09 May 2007 by

Virus Bulletin