#######################################################################

Luigi Auriemma

Application: Quake 3 engine
http://www.idsoftware.com
Games: - Call of Duty <= 1.5
- Call of Duty: United Offensive <= 1.51
- Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.2 <= 1.02
- Quake III Arena <= 1.32
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein <= 1.41
- Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix <= 1.03
- Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force <= 1.20
- Star Trek: Elite Force II <= 1.10
- Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast <= 1.04
- Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy <= 1.011
- Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory <= 1.02 / 2.56
...possibly others
Platforms: Windows, Linux and Mac
Bug: crash or shutdown caused by incorrect handling of big
queries
Exploitation: remote, versus server
Date: 12 Feb 2005
Author: Luigi Auriemma
e-mail: aluigi (at) autistici (dot) org [email concealed]
web: http://aluigi.altervista.org

#######################################################################

1) Introduction
2) Bug
3) The Code
4) Fix

#######################################################################

===============
1) Introduction
===============

The Quake 3 engine is the well known game engine developed by ID
Software (http://www.idsoftware.com) and is used by many games.

Some months ago I reported similar problems in three games based on
this engine: Medal of Honor, Call of Duty and Soldier of Fortune II.
Except for Medal of Honor that is affected by a specific buffer
overflow, the other two games can be "probably" included in this
advisory too but I'm not totally sure.

#######################################################################

======
2) Bug
======

The Quake 3 engine has problems to handle big queries allowing an
attacker to shutdown any game server based on this engine:

ERROR: Info_SetValueForKey: oversize infostring

In some of the vulnerable games is also possible to crash the server.

#######################################################################

===========
3) The Code
===========

http://aluigi.altervista.org/poc/q3infoboom.zip

A simple scanner for testing any game based on the Quake 3 engine.

#######################################################################

======
4) Fix
======

Only the two Call of Duty games have been fixed with the 1.5b and 1.51b
patches, all the others are still vulnerable.

I have released an universal patcher that limits the amount of handled
data in the queries from 1023 to 767 solving the problem in any game:

http://aluigi.altervista.org/patches/q3infofix.zip

(only in Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.2 is needed to reduce the amount of
handled data to less than 512 instead of 767)

#######################################################################

---
Luigi Auriemma
http://aluigi.altervista.org

[ reply ]