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Microsoft Office Jet Database Engine Column Parsing Stack Overflow Vulnerability

TPTI-08-04: May 13th, 2008

CVE ID

Affected Vendors

Affected Products

TippingPoint™ IPS Customer Protection

TippingPoint IPS customers are protected against this vulnerability by Digital Vaccine protection filter IDs 6040 and 6041. For further product information on the TippingPoint IPS:

Vulnerability Details

This vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of Microsoft Office. Exploitation requires that the target opens an Office file that contains malicious Jet DB Engine objects.

The specific flaw exists within the parsing of a column structure. The DWORD value from the structure that specifies the column count is trusted. If this value is changed, an inline memcpy to the stack can overflow while reading a column name. Typically Jet DB structures are used within MDB files which are considered unsafe. However, it is possible to embed such files within a trusted format, such as an Office Document (.doc). This issue allows for remote code execution under the context of the currently logged in user.

Vendor Response

Microsoft has issued an update to correct this vulnerability. More details can be found at:

Disclosure Timeline

    2008-04-19 - Vulnerability reported to vendor
    2008-05-13 - Coordinated public release of advisory

Credit

This vulnerability was discovered by: