BugTraq summary, week of 25 jan 1999.

controlit vulnerability
ControlIT is a tool that lets you have complete remote control over Windows boxes (useful for classrooms, etc).  It uses a trivially-broken encryption to encrypt the passwords used to authenticate the "controller", so anyone using a "slave" box can easily snoop the wire and decode the "controller" passwords.  Also some commands like "reboot" aren't authenticated at all, so anyone can reboot anyone else's box remotely.

padlockit with bad encryption
PadlockIt is some Windows tool that lets you store all your passwords in one file, presumably with that file itself password-protected.  The encryption of this file is really bad, though, with no random seeding, so it's fairly easy to figure out passwords in the file.

ibm cics has variation of /tmp race
IBM's suid-root CICS client, when run in trace mode, creates a file in /var/cicscli (a world-writable directory) named 'shared' without checking for softlinks, etc.  Any user can make a softlink to, for example, /etc/shadow and the CICS client will overwrite it.

security analysis: windows update
Windows has a thing called "Windows Update" which will download and install patches to the OS automatically.  Several people on Bugtraq have been analysing the update mechanism to detect weak points.  Apparently the Windows box does a DNS lookup on "windowsupdate.microsoft.com", then connects to a web server there and downloads the entire list of patches that have ever been done to Windows.  The list is compared to the list of patches already installed, and new ones are downloaded from the same web server and installed (after prompting the user).  The list is signed, so the real weak point appears to be the possibility of deflecting the DNS and/or replacing the patches themselves.

windows ce a bit too helpful
Windows CE apparently has a feature where it will try to complete words as you type/scrawl them.  The down side of this is that if you are entering a password, it may pop up a dialog box with helpful completions, letting others see what the first few characters of your password are.

unix tty/modem bug
The authors of the post were vague, but the impression I got is that a user can connect to a unix machine via a dial-up modem tty, and then cause that tty to "hangup" via a backgrounded process.  That process could then keep the modem "in use" by holding its fd or something.  I could be wrong.  All unixen are believed to be vulnerable.

rpcbind can be spoofed
The rpcbind tool on Linux 2.0, Solaris 2.6, and Irix 6.2 will allow remote users to make changes if they are spoofing IP addresses.  This is possible because rpcbind doesn't have any back-and-forth communication -- a one-way command from afar is all that's required.

site server serves others
Microsoft Site Server is an add-on for IIS (web server).  One thing it likes to do is have a /users directory where users can add their own pages (including server-side scripted pages, like ASP).  If the /users directory doesn't exist, though, and someone connects to the "upload" script and successfully logs in, a /users directory is created with permissions that leave a lot to be desired.  From that point on, anyone may put scriptable content into that directory.

browser bugs

buffer overflows Some guys from "WooWoo" wrote an explanation of stack-based and heap-based buffer overflows, how they work, what they are, how to avoid them, etc.  I only read the top few pages, but it looked interesting.  You can find the article at http://www.w00w00.org/articles.html .