NGSSoftware Insight Security Research Advisory

Name: Oracle 10g/9i extproc directory traversal
Systems Affected: Oracle 10g/9i on all operating systems  
Severity: Medium Risk
Vendor URL: http://www.oracle.com/
Author: David Litchfield [ davidl at ngssoftware.com ]
Relates to: http://www.nextgenss.com/advisories/oracle-01.txt
Date of Public Advisory: 23rd December 2004
Advisory number: #NISR23122004B
Advisory URL: http://www.ngssoftware.com/advisories/oracle23122004B.txt

Description
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The Oracle database server supports PL/SQL, a programming language. PL/SQL
can execute external procedures via extproc. Over the past few years there
has been a number of vulnerabilities in this area:

http://www.nextgenss.com/advisories/oraplsextproc.txt
http://www.nextgenss.com/advisories/ora-extproc.txt

Extproc has been found to suffer from a directory traversal problem that
allows attackers access to arbitray libraries.

Details
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extproc verifies that the library to be loaded is in the $ORACLE_HOME\bin
directory. This is to ensure that libraries outside of this directory cannot
be loaded. However, there exists a directory traversal issue whereby an
attacker can break outside of this constraint. This can allow attackers to
access libraries such as libc and msvcrt.dll. By calling the system()
function attackers can run arbitrary OS commands.



Fix Information
***************
A patch (#68) was released for this problem by Oracle. See
http://metalink.oracle.com/ for more details. NGSSQuirreL for Oracle
(http://www.nextgenss.com/squirrelora.htm), can be used to assess whether
your Oracle servers are vulnerable to this.


About NGSSoftware
*****************
NGSSoftware design, research and develop intelligent, advanced application
security assessment scanners. Based in the United Kingdom, NGSSoftware have
offices in the South of London and the East Coast of Scotland. NGSSoftware's
sister company NGSConsulting, offers best of breed security consulting
services, specialising in application, host and network security
assessments.

http://www.ngssoftware.com/

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