Hole found in Check Point's FireWall-1 and VPN-1
 
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A vulnerability in Check Point Software Technologies' Firewall-1 and VPN-1 firewalls may allow intruders to tunnel illegitimate traffic into or out of corporate networks.
The hole was discovered last month by Inside Security, a spin-off of the University of Stuttgart's security team in Germany. The hole could be exploited to passively snoop inside corporate networks or to launch certain types of denial-of-service attacks, according to the CERT Coordination Center security response team at Carnegie Mellon University, which issued a bulletin on the vulnerability Monday.
"This is a pretty serious vulnerability [because] Check Point is one of the most widely deployed firewalls on the Internet," said Ian Finlay, a member of the CERT team.
The vulnerability involves a proprietary protocol called RDP that is used in Check Point's firewalls for internally communicating between software components. By default, VPN-1/FireWall-1 allows RDP packets to traverse firewall gateways to simplify encryption setup, according to Check Point's advisory on the topic.
Under some conditions, malicious packets with RDP headers could be constructed that would be allowed across the firewall, according to the Check Point bulletin.
Users can get around the problem by installing a patch from Check Point.
Until the patch can be applied, users can reduce their risks by configuring their routers to block access to the port that is exploited by the vulnerability, CERT said in its advisory.
Although there have been no reported security incidents related to this vulnerability, CERT is recommending that all affected sites upgrade their software as soon as possible.
"The thing to keep in mind is that the very nature of a firewall is to block traffic from reaching your internal network. This is a situation where that assumed fundamental protection [is breached]" said Shawn Hernan, a CERT member.
For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld online. Story copyright © 2001 Computerworld, Inc. All rights reserved.
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