TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative
 

Apple QuickTime H.264 Nal Unit Length Heap Overflow Vulnerability

ZDI-09-063: September 10th, 2009

CVE ID

Affected Vendors

Affected Products

TippingPoint™ IPS Customer Protection

TippingPoint IPS customers are protected against this vulnerability by Digital Vaccine protection filter ID 8435. For further product information on the TippingPoint IPS:

Vulnerability Details

This vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of Apple QuickTime. User interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability in that the target must visit a malicious page or open a malicious file.

The specific flaw exists during the parsing of samples from a malformed MOV file utilizing the H.264 codec. While parsing data to render the stream, the application will mistrust a length that is used to initialize a heap chunk that was allocated in a header. If the length is larger than the size of the chunk allocated, then a memory corruption will occur leading to code execution under the context of the currently logged in user.

Vendor Response

Apple has issued an update to correct this vulnerability. More details can be found at:

Disclosure Timeline

    2009-07-28 - Vulnerability reported to vendor
    2009-09-10 - Coordinated public release of advisory

Credit

This vulnerability was discovered by:
    Anonymous
    Damian Put