COMMAND
FPSE
SYSTEMS AFFECTED
Microsoft IIS 5.0
PROBLEM
Microsoft IIS ships with Front Page Server Extensions (FPSE) which
enables administrators remote and local web page and content
management. Browse - time support is another feature within FPSE
which provides users with functional web applications.
Due to the way FPSE handles the processing of web forms, IIS is
subject to a denial of service. By supplying malformed data to
one of the FPSE functions IIS will stop responding. A restart of
the service is required in order to gain normal functionality.
It should be noted that the victim only requires to have FPSE
installed on the web server to be vulnerable.
So, any current NT server running IIS with Frontpage server
extensions (which are installed by default) is vulnerable a
remote DoS (Denial of Service).
According to eEye team, the vulnerability stems from Frontpage
improperly handling queries to Frontpage Authoring (author.dll)
modules as well as shtml calls. It is possible for a remote
attacker to send a malformed query to those modules which will
cause Frontpage to crash which will then in turn bring down
inetinfo.exe on Windows NT 4.0 systems. On Windows 2000 systems
the vulnerability is a bit different. Inetinfo.exe is not
killed, it just simply "freezes". You can still connect to the
IIS5 web server but any further GET/HEAD/etc.. commands will not
be procesed. Microsoft's advisory states that IIS5 will simply
restart however we did not experience this in our testing. The
two vulnerable pieces of Frontpage are:
/_vti_bin/shtml.dll/_vti_rpc
/_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.dll
Example Exploit:
http://www.eEye.com/html/advisories/FPDOSNT4.txt
http://www.eEye.com/html/advisories/FPDOSNT4NT5.txt
This has been discovered by eEye Digital Security and posted in a
Microsoft Security Bulletin (MS00-100) on Dec 22, 2000.
SOLUTION
Microsoft has released a patch which addresses this issue:
IIS 5.0: http://download.microsoft.com/download/win2000platform/Patch/q280322/NT5/EN-US/Q280322_W2K_SP2_x86_en.EXE
IIS 4.0: http://download.microsoft.com/download/winntsrv40/Patch/q280322/NT4/EN-US/Q280322i.EXE