Samba Susceptible to Malicious Code Injection

The developers of Samba, an open source software enabling file and print sharing between Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X computers, released security patches to address critical vulnerabilities that can be polluted by remote attacker's on implementing random code on systems where the samba service is running, as reported by pcworld on April 11, 2012.

The malicious code in Samba Version 3.6.3 and the previous version is a buffer overflow flaw in Samba's inaccessible procedure call code.

The most serious vulnerability pertaining to the access of the same is that it does not require any authenticated connection for its access. Users and vendors are being lured enormously by all means to patch on their samba installations immediately according to the newly issued advisory from Samba on the CVE-2012-1182 vulnerability.

The most recent stable release of Samba version 3.6.3, is susceptible to the vulnerability, despite only being released at the end of January 2012 and older version 3.0.25 are also affected. Although this advisory claims the version 3.0.x to be vulnerable, Samba contributor, Jelmer Vernoojj has clarified that the issue only goes back as far as 3.0.25. Given that 3.0.25 was released in 2007, this would mean that the vulnerabilities had been present since 5 years, as per the news published in zdnet.

According to the Senior Vice President and Head of trust ware spider labs, Nicholas Percoco the flaw affect those who have entrenched Linux-based appliances that employs Samba for file sharing, e.g. NASes, print servers, and printers. These devices, however are inclined to run in an intranet to a certain extent than over the big internet. The major risk would still remain to be from complicated targeted attack or a malicious attack or a malevolent insider, according to news published in darkreading on April 11, 2012.

According to the security experts, the vulnerability is serious and this is also evident from Samba development team's decision to release patch, even for version which are not officially supported.

Commenting on the above mentioned statement, Carsten Eiram, Chief Security Specialist at Secunia, the unauthenticated code execution vulnerability in Samba still seems to be quite interesting for creating a working exploit, as per news published in pcworld on April 11, 2012.

Related article: Samba Vulnerability Could Allow Harmful Code Injection

» SPAMfighter News - 4/18/2012