COMMAND
ZoneAlarm
SYSTEMS AFFECTED
ZoneAlarm
PROBLEM
Wally Whacker found following. ZoneAlarm is a very popular
personal firewall for Microsoft Windows computers and easy
to use for newbies because it is application based, meaning, you
apply network permission to applications instead of ports.
Because it is application based, Wally was wondering how it
handled ports that weren't applications, i.e., what about ports
that are opened by the kernel? He tried scanning a ZoneAlarm
protected machine using various source ports that are often
problems for other firewall environments. What he found was this.
If one uses port 67 as the SOURCE port of a UDP scan, ZoneAlarm
will let the packet through and will not notify the user. This
means, that one can UDP port scan a ZoneAlarm protected computer
as if there were no firewall there IF one uses port 67 as the
source port on the packets. The version wally tested this on was
2.1.10.
It is strongly suspected port 67 needs to be left open because it
is used for DHCP. On an earlier version 2.0.26 UDP packets from
source port 53 also behaved as above but this doesn't seem to be
the case with this latest version. The test was this:
1) Download and install ZoneAlarm version 2.1.10
2) From another computer (unix, linux, etc) run
nmap -P0 -p130-140 -sU 192.168.128.88 <-Your Computer Ip Address
This will run a small UDP scan on the computer.
3) ZoneAlarm will throw up alarms on these UDP probes
4) NOW, run nmap -g67 -P0 -p130-140 -sU 192.168.128.88 (Notice
the -g67 which specifies source port). This will run the
same test as above except the packets will have a source
port of 67.
5) ZoneAlarm will not throw up any alerts AND if you have any
services running on those ports, nmap will find them.
SOLUTION
The port 67 vulnerability has been eliminated. The upgraded
version of ZoneAlarm contains the fix and is available from
http://www.zonelabs.com/download_ZA.htm
Previously, ZoneAlarm did not prevent TCP or UDP packets from
entering the computer through port 67. Port 67 was deliberately
left open to avoid instabilities encountered on Windows NT
machines using DHCP.