Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Vulnerabilities

Remotely Exploitable Flaws Patched in DHCP

Updates released by the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) for the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) software patch two remotely exploitable vulnerabilities discovered by a researcher at Google.

Updates released by the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) for the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) software patch two remotely exploitable vulnerabilities discovered by a researcher at Google.

Felix Wilhelm of the Google Security Team found that the DHCP Client (dhclient), which provides a means for configuring network interfaces, is affected by a buffer overflow vulnerability that allows a malicious server to cause the client to crash.

In some cases, exploitation of the flaw could also lead to remote code execution, ISC said in an advisory. The security hole is tracked as CVE-2018-5732 and rated high severity.

“Where they are present, operating system mitigation strategies such as address space layout randomization (ASLR) should make it difficult to leverage this vulnerability to achieve remote code execution but we can not rule it out as impossible. The safest course is to patch dhclient so that the buffer overflow cannot occur,” ISC said.

The second vulnerability, CVE-2018-5733, is a medium severity issue that can be exploited to exhaust the memory available to the DHCP daemon (dhcpd), resulting in a denial-of-service (DoS) condition to clients.

“A malicious client which is allowed to send very large amounts of traffic (billions of packets) to a DHCP server can eventually overflow a 32-bit reference counter, potentially causing dhcpd to crash,” ISC said.

The flaws affect DHCP versions 4.1.0 through 4.1-ESV-R15, 4.2.0 through 4.2.8, 4.3.0 through 4.3.6, and 4.4.0. Fixes are included in versions 4.1-ESV-R15-P1, 4.3.6-P1 and 4.4.1.

ISC said there was no evidence that the vulnerabilities had been exploited for malicious purposes.

The organization has also informed customers of a vulnerability affecting BIND Supported Preview Edition, which is a customer-only, non-public version of BIND. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2018-5734 and rated high severity, can lead to an assertion failure, which typically causes the software to crash.

Related: Google Finds Flaws in Dnsmasq Network Services Tool

Related: DNS Servers Crash Due to BIND Security Flaw

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Risk Management

The supply chain threat is directly linked to attack surface management, but the supply chain must be known and understood before it can be...

Vulnerabilities

Apple has released updates for macOS, iOS and Safari and they all include a WebKit patch for a zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-23529.

Application Security

Drupal released updates that resolve four vulnerabilities in Drupal core and three plugins.

Cloud Security

VMware vRealize Log Insight vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to take full control of a target system.

Application Security

A CSRF vulnerability in the source control management (SCM) service Kudu could be exploited to achieve remote code execution in multiple Azure services.

IoT Security

Lexmark warns of a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability impacting over 120 printer models, for which PoC code has been published.

Vulnerabilities

GoAnywhere MFT users warned about a zero-day remote code injection exploit that can be targeted directly from the internet