TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative
 

IBM TSM FastBack Server _DAS_ReadBlockReply Remote Denial of Service Vulnerability

ZDI-10-187: September 29th, 2010

Affected Vendors

Affected Products

TippingPoint™ IPS Customer Protection

TippingPoint IPS customers are protected against this vulnerability by Digital Vaccine protection filter ID 9649. For further product information on the TippingPoint IPS:

Vulnerability Details

This vulnerability allows remote attackers to create a denial of service condition on vulnerable installations of IBM Tivoli FastBack Server. Authentication is not required to exploit this vulnerability.

The specific flaw exists within FastBackServer.exe process which listens by default on TCP port 11406. The problematic code resides within a function responsible for reading a block of network packet data. A parameter to this function is initialized to 0 and under certain conditions this value will be accessed before properly initialized. This causes a NULL pointer to be dereferenced and subsequent application crash due to a lack of exception handling. Successful exploitation leads to immediate termination of the fastback server.

Vendor Response

IBM states:

http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21443820
Issue 3


Disclosure Timeline

    2010-02-02 - Vulnerability reported to vendor
    2010-09-29 - Coordinated public release of advisory

Credit

This vulnerability was discovered by:
    Sebastian Apelt (www.siberas.de)