On 02/20/2002, Martin O'Neal of Corsaire Ltd. posted: -- Corsaire Limited Security Advisory -- Title: Symantec Enterprise Firewall (SEF) Notify Daemon data loss via SNMP Date: 21.01.02 Application: Symantec Enterprise Firewall (SEF) 6.5.x Environment: WinNT, Win2000 Author: Martin O'Neal [martin.oneal@corsaire.com] Audience: General distribution -- Scope -- The aim of this document is to clearly define some issues related to potential data loss from the Notify Daemon within the Symantec Enterprise Firewall (SEF) environment as provided by Symantec [1]. Note: These issues do NOT appear to be directly related to recent SNMP issues announced by CERT as advisory CA-2002-03 [2]. ------------------------------------------------snip------------------------------------------------------------------- Symantec Security Response Advisory 20 February, 2002 Symantec Enterprise Firewall SNMP Notify Daemon drops alerts, Reference Corsaire Limited Security Advisory 020121-001c.txt Risk Impact Medium Affected Components Symantec Enterprise Firewall versions 6.5.x and 7.0 Overview Corsaire Limited discovered an issue with the way Symantec Enterprise Firewall handled SNMP notify alerts that could cause alerts to be dropped in certain instances. NOTE: The SNMP notify daemon issue addressed by Corsaire Limited in their Advisory is NOT related to CERT Advisory CA-2002-03, Multiple Vulnerabilities in Many Implementations of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Details Corsaire Limited notified Symantec Corporation of an issue in the way Symantec Enterprise Firewall handled some event alerts. This issue could, potentially, result in the failure of event alerts to be logged or the administrator to be notified. Symantec Enterprise Firewall provides many methods to alert an administrator about firewall log events based on the functionality of a subsystem called the Notify daemon. One of these notification methods sends SNMP traps to the network management station where they are centrally managed. However, if the firewall log entry exceeds an established size threshold, the Notify daemon drops the SNMP trap and logs a "failed to notify" error message instead. In the event that SNMP is the only alert mechanism used, the administrator may fail to receive notifications for which he or she has established alert criteria. Symantec Response Symantec has verified the logging issues identified by Corsaire Limited. The problem exists in the way the Notify daemon allocates the buffer size for the SNMP traps. In certain instances, while encoding the SNMP trap, the message may exceed the allocated buffer size. In these instances, the SNMP trap is dropped and the error message is logged. NOTE: This problem is a notification handling issue only. The issue does not allow unauthorized access to the system nor is it possible to maliciously create a DoS condition using this issue. To address this SNMP issue, Symantec has developed hotfixes available for download for affected versions: · Enterprise Product Support http://www.symantec.com/techsupp/enterprise/ This advisory can be viewed at http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/security/Content/ 2002.02.20a.html Credit Symantec takes the security and proper functionality of its products very seriously. Symantec appreciates the coordination of Martin O'Neal and Corsaire Limited in identifying and providing technical details of potential areas of concern so it can quickly address the issue. Anyone with information on security issues with Symantec products should contact symsecurity@symantec.com. Copyright (c) 2002 by Symantec Corp. Permission to redistribute this Advisory electronically is granted as long as it is not edited in any way unless authorized by Symantec Security Response. Reprinting the whole or part of this Advisory in a medium other than electronically requires permission from Sym Security@symantec.com. Disclaimer The information in the advisory is believed to be accurate at the time of printing based on currently available information. Use of the information constitutes acceptance for use in an AS IS condition. There are no warranties with regard to this information. Neither the author nor the publisher accepts any liability for any direct, indirect or consequential loss or damage arising from use of, or reliance on this information. Symantec, Symantec Security Response, Symantec product names and Sym Security are Registered Trademarks of Symantec Corp. and/or affiliated companies in the United States and other countries. All other registered and unregistered trademarks represented in this document are the sole property of their respective companies/owners.
