Another security problem - oh, not again

In short I got two news - a bad one and a good one.

  1. The bad news: we got reported about one more security issue in Image Uploader.
  2. The good news: the problem occurs in version 4.5.70 only. All later builds (including version 5) are not affected by this problem.

Now let's see on this a bit more detailed.

Details 

Yesterday I got a message from Elazar Broad - a guy who have posted a security issue report on November. This time he reported that he tested build 4.5.70 and found the heap overflow issue in Action param. He created an exploit which runs calculator app when the page with Image Uploader is opened. You see this is a really serious problem. If hackers created an exploit, they would be able to run anything more dangerous than calc app.

I have bring it to attention of Image Uploader development team immediately. Few hours later we got a call from Computer World - they asked to hear our comments on this. As a result they have published an article about it.

Meanwhile during our investigation we found out that the problem does not affect the latest version. Looking at this more closely, we find out that it has been fixed in the build which was next to famous 4.5.70. After that hotfix release we have audited and refactored a lot of potentially buggy code, and managed to work it out without any clue that we have fixed such serious flaw.

Conclusions

So everyone who have upgraded Image Uploader to 5.0 or at least to higher build than 4.5.70 can have no worries. Latest builds of Image Uploader (both 4.x and 5.x) are not vulnerable to the problem reported by Elazar. Also, version 3.5 is not vulnerable as well.

If you have updated to 4.5.70 (or for some reason overlooked previous security update and did not get it), you should either update it to the most recent build of 4.x family or upgrade to version 5.0. Here are links:

  • Image Uploader 4.6 SDK - you will find updated .cab file after SDK installation in C:\Program Files\Aurigma\Image Uploader 4.6 Dual\ folder (or wherever you install it).
  • Upgrade FAQ with information about upgrade policy and links to appropriate online store items.

If you are not sure what is your version, do not hesitate to contact us.

What Next?

We always take all these security challenges very seriously. This is only a second security flaw for 5-year history of Image Uploader. For these 5 years hundreds millions of people uploaded files through it, so we have to take care about it.

So both these security holes are the cause for us to look through all our code more thorough. We did make some refactoring after discovering the first security bug, but that time we had on a tight schedule - we was trying to release 5.0 within year 2007, so we stopped when made most obvious improvements.

Now we have no heavy time limitations, so we are going to make detailed code review with heavy paranoid approach. As a result we will have a version (both 4 and 5) which will be more secure and reliable than ever.

So keep an eye on this and do not forget to update Image Uploader timely!