zlib Denial of Service Vulnerability

Secunia ID	SA16137
CVE-ID	CVE-2005-1849
Release Date	21 Jul 2005
Last Change	22 Jul 2005
Criticality	Moderately Critical Typically used for remotely exploitable Denial of Service vulnerabilities against services like FTP, HTTP, and SMTP, and for vulnerabilities that allow system compromises but require user interaction. This rating is also used for vulnerabilities allowing system compromise on LANs in services like SMB, RPC, NFS, LPD and similar services that are not intended for use over the Internet.
Solution Status	Vendor Patch
Software	zlib 1.x
Where	From remote "From remote" describes other vulnerabilities where the attack vector doesn't require access to the system or a local network. This category covers services that are acceptable to expose to the Internet (e.g. HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP). It also covers client applications used on the Internet and certain vulnerabilities where it is reasonable to assume that a security conscious user can be tricked into performing certain actions.
Impact	DoS (Denial of Service) This includes vulnerabilities ranging from excessive resource consumption (e.g. causing a system to use a lot of memory) to crashing an application or an entire system.
Description	Markus Oberhumer has reported a vulnerability in zlib, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) against a vulnerable application. The vulnerability is caused due to the insufficient size of the code table declared in inflate.h, and can be exploited to cause an application using the zlib library to crash via a specially crafted input file. The vulnerability has been reported in version 1.2.2. Prior versions may also be affected.
Solution	Update to version 1.2.3.
Reported by	Markus Oberhumer
Original Advisory	Debian: http://www.debian.org/security/2005/dsa-763