Blackberry Server Security Flaw Exposed

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Good news, bad news weekend for RIM. First, two more NTP patents were rejected by the U.S. Patent Office. Good News.

Then, the bad news. Information was released at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress hacker convention in Berlin by “FX” of the security research group Phenoelit, which indicated there was a security vulnerability in the way certain image files were handled.

Brian Krebs of the Washington Post managed to talk to FX (a.k.a. Felix Lindner), and got some details about the threat.

Lindner said the real problem — a vulnerability in the way Blackberry servers handle portable network graphics (PNG) images, was not disclosed by either RIM or the US-CERT advisory. Lindner said he suspects that’s because this PNG flaw is present not in the newest version of Blackberry server but in all versions from 4.0 to 4.0.1.9 (the latter was released roughly a month ago, and no doubt many companies still run that version).

Lindner found that by convincing a Blackberry user to click on a special image attachment, that handheld device could be made to pass on malicious code to the Blackberry server, which could then be taken over and used to intercept e-mails or as a staging point for other attacks within the network. Source: The Washington Post

We Say: It looks like US-CERT needs to add this to its list for 2006. Lindner agreed to withhold the slides from his presentation until RIM has fully fixed this problem. According to Information Week, RIM has indicated it has fixes for the issue, but there’s been no official announcement on it as yet.