SLP daemon targeted by Apple bug hunters

Stephen Withers
Friday, 19 January 2007 03:37

Your IT - Home IT

Day 17 of the Month of Apple Bugs brought word of a vulnerability in slpd, the SLP daemon used to advertise services such as file sharing to the network.

Programs that make services available can register themselves with slpd, but it is possible for a malicious program to send a malformed registration request that causes a buffer overflow, "leading to an exploitable denial of service condition and potential arbitrary execution", according to the advisory.

The suggested workaround is to "Disable Personal file sharing and ensure slpd isn't running", but if SLP is disabled using the Directory Access utility before starting personal file sharing, slpd does not run and file sharing still works. iChat's use of Bonjour for setting up chat sessions across a LAN is similarly unaffected in this configuration, but other software relying on slpd may fail if the daemon is not running.