May 1st, 2007
'Highly critical' Trillian, Winamp flaws flagged
Security holes in two popular desktop software applications could put millions of computer users at risk of code execution attacks.
The flaws, rated "highly critical," were flagged in the Trillian cross-platform IM program and Nullsoft's Winamp media player.
Trillian, the multi-protocol chat tool that allows users to connet to IRC, AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo within a single client, is vulnerable to three separate IRC flaws that could allow for the interception of private conversations or execution of code as the currently logged on user.
- When handling long CTCP PING messages containing UTF-8 characters, it is possible to cause the Trillian IRC client to return a malformed response to the server. This malformed response is truncated and is missing the terminating newline character. This could allow the next line sent to the server to be improperly sent to an attacker.
- When a user highlights a URL in an IRC message window Trillian copies the data to an internal buffer. If the URL contains a long string of UTF-8 characters, it is possible to overflow a heap based buffer corrupting memory in a way that could allow for code execution.
- A heap overflow can be triggered remotely when the Trillian IRC module receives a message that contains a font face HTML tag with the face attribute set to a long UTF-8 string.
Cerulean Studios, the company that markets Trillian, has patched the flaw in version 3.1.5.0.
A separate advisory from Secunia warns of a "highly critical" system access flaw affecting the Winamp media player.
The vulnerability is caused due to an error within the handling of MP4 files and can be exploited to cause memory corruption via a specially crafted MP4 file, according to an alert from Secunia. Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code.
Exploit code for this vulnerability is already in circulation.
Ryan Naraine is a journalist and security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab. He manages Threatpost.com, a security news portal. Here is Ryan's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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