[Full-disclosure] Adobe Unchecked Overflow

Exploitable issue in various Adobe products
c0ntex ([email protected]) Scott Laurie
February 2008

Vulnerable applications, tested:
Adobe Photoshop Album Starter
Adobe After Effects CS3
Adobe Photoshop CS3

Not Vulnerable applications, tested:
Adobe Reader
Adobe Flash Player

This bug is related to the parsing of header images, in that the
applications
do not verify that the image header is valid before trying to render it.
This
leaves an opportunity to cause an unchecked buffer overflow and allow for
the
execution of malicious code.

All the issues are standard local overflows whereby an attacker can exploit
a
machine after sending the malicious image to the user, or by placing the
image
on a web site or email and waiting for a user to view it in one of the
effected
products.

One fun thing with Album Starter is that it will run a service which will
look
for new devices being attached to the system, things like cameras or USB
drives
and when one is found it will check the device for image files. If some are
found, the application will auto-run and import the images and thus allow
the
attacker to exploit locked workstations… pretty lame but fun :)

There is a caveats to the bug as the shellcode and return address need to be
4
byte values. Thus a return address of 0x41424344 needs to be in the
following
format: "\x44\x44\x44\x44\x43\x43\x43\x43\x42\x42\x42\x42\x41\x41\x41\x41"

Exploit attached for Album Starter 3.2 on Windows XP SP2 to pop calc.exe:
Used shellcode is taken from the Metasploit project.

regards
c0ntex