Security Vulnerability in Netscape 6.x and 7 With PNG Files

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Impact

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Library libpng(3) which also affect Netscape 6.x/7 shipped with Solaris since Netscape 6.x/7 includes the affected libpng routines. This may allow an unprivileged user to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of a local user. This condition can be exploited when the local user has loaded a Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format image file supplied by an untrusted user and views a malicious web site or views an e-mail message containing a malformed PNG image with that application.

Note: Netscape is utilized as web browser and editor, an irc client, an email client, and a news client.

This issue is also described in the following documents:

CERT Technical Cyber Security Alert TA04-217A at http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA04-217A.html

CVE CAN-2004-0597 at http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2004-0597

CVE CAN-2004-0598 at http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2004-0598

CVE CAN-2004-0599 at http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2004-0599

Contributing Factors

This issue can occur in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

• Solaris 7, 8 and 9 with Netscape 6.x/7

x86 Platform

• Solaris 7, 8 and 9 with Netscape 6.x/7

Note: Netscape 7 was shipped in Solaris 9 Update 3 and later updates, and was also available via the Sun Download Center (SDLC) for Solaris 7, 8 and 9 (part of the SUNWnsb package).

To determine the version of Netscape installed on a system, the following command can be run:

    $ pkginfo -l SUNWnsb | grep VERSION
    VERSION:  7.0,REV=10.2002.12.11

To determine which Solaris 9 Update release is installed on the system check the contents of the "/etc/release" file:

    $ cat /etc/release
    Solaris 9 12/03 s9s_u5wos_08b SPARC
    Copyright 2003 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.
    ...

Symptoms

There are no predictable symptoms that would indicate the described issue has been exploited.

Workaround

There is no workaround for this issue.

Resolution

A final resolution is pending completion.

Modification History


Date: 06-JAN-2005

• Add Netscape version 6.x to all instances of Netscape listed

Attachments

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