Monday, October 12, 2009

Palm Pre WebOS version <= 1.1 Floating Point Crash

I. Description

The Palm Pre WebOS version <=1.1 suffers from a floating point exception crash when attempting to view a specially crafted web page. This vulnerability has been addressed in the latest patch from Palm and all users are recommended to update to WebOS version 1.2+.

II. Impact

If a user is sent to a malicious web page that contains specially crafted data, the LunaSysMgr process will crash, causing the phone to simulate a reboot. The crash itself is a floating point error that crashes the "LunaSysMgr" process and forces the phone to restart the process, simulating a reboot of the system. At the time of the discovery, the greatest risk to the system was a crash/denial of service vulnerability.

The crash does not occur when viewing the malicious web page while in landscape mode.


III Proof of Concept

The Palm Pre WebOS will crash upon opening a web page that contains 50,280 bytes of data and then attempts to refresh the page. Upon viewing the malicious web page the phone will "crash".

The following code will trigger the crash

"<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1">AAAAA..." using 50280 or more characters after the refresh.

IV. About

This vulnerability was discovered by Townsend Ladd Harris

Vulnerability details will be posted to: http://tlhsecurity.blogspot.com/ upon release of a patch.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Mailing Lists post the vulnerabilities!

After a few days, both security focus and secunia published the vulnerabilities.

Links:

Bugtraq: Here
Secunia: Here

I have not submitted the floating point crash in the Web Browser to them yet, but apparently Secunia folks have read my blog and know an "unspecified" issues exists, so they made a placeholder.

Oddly, both Secunia and Securityfocus are both showing vulnerabilities in WebOS <=1.2.1 with unspecified details disclosed by the vendor, overall they claim something is wrong with it but give zero details. Why are these not merged with my issues or vice versa :/

Floating point details to come in next few days.

Thanks

-Ladd

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Palm Pre WebOS <=1.1 Remote File Access Vulnerability

Below are the details of the remote file access vulnerability I have released to various vulnerability mailing lists. To view a flash video that demonstrates how to exploit this bug please check out: Click To Watch

The folks over at Precentral.net did a nice write up on the issue as well:

http://www.precentral.net/update-12-fixed-serious-file-security-issue

I. Description

The Palm Pre WebOS <=1.1 suffers from a JavaScript injection attack that allows a malicious attacker to access any file on the mobile device.

Palm has patched this vulnerability and all users are recommended to upgrade to WebOS version 1.2+.

Palm WebOS 1.2 patch notes can be found here:
http://kb.palm.com/wps/portal/kb/na/pre/p100eww/sprint/solutions/article/50607_en.html#12

II. Impact

A specially crafted email can access any file on the Palm Pre WebOS version <=1.1 mobile device and send it to a web site of the attacker's choice just by viewing the email.

III. Details

The Palm Pre WebOS 1.1 and lower will parse and execute JavaScript contained in an email it receives. Exploiting this vulnerability allows an attacker to read/extract any file and post it to a remote website the attacker controls.

One particular file of interest is the "PalmDatabase.db3" file. Having this database file will give an attacker emails, email addresses, contact list information including names, phone numbers, etc. Limitations with binary data have been identified, however viewing binary data such as database files is still simple.

Proof of Concept

Creating an email with the following JavaScript in it will automatically upload a file of the attacker's choice to a remote web server:



To view a Flash demo of this exploit in action:

http://tlhsecurity.com/videos/FA.html

IV. About

This vulnerability was discovered by Townsend Ladd Harris

Special Thanks to :
- Chris Rohlf - Blog: http://em386.blogspot.com/
- Destinal #webos-internals (irc.freenode.com)
- Webos-Internals group #webos-internals(irc.freenode.com) Website: Here
- Bryce Kerley
- Dan Czarnecki
- Jeremy Rasmussen