Zero-Day Advisory

Fortinet Discovers Microsoft Office RTF File Handling Memory Corruption Vulnerability

Summary

Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs has discovered a memory corruption vulnerability in Microsoft Office.
Microsoft Office is an office suite of applications, servers and services. It was first announced by Microsoft in 1988. The first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. Over the years, Office applications have grown substantially closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, OLE data integration and Visual Basic for Applications scripting language. Microsoft also positions Office as a development platform for line-of-business software under the Office Business Applications brand.
A memory corruption vulnerability has been identified in Microsoft Office when it fails to parse RTF documents correctly. Successful exploitation of this issue could allow malicious users to create remote code execution scenarios. The underlying problem involves a typical heap overflow caused by a user-supplied value which is copied into a buffer allocated based on a user-supplied length.

Solutions

FortiGuard Labs released the following FortiGate IPS signature which covers this specific vulnerability:

MS.Office.RTF.Memory.Corruption
Released Jan 07, 2016
Users should apply the solution provided by Microsoft.

Additional Information

All major Office versions for both Windows and Mac OS X are affected by this vulnerability.

References

Acknowledgement

This vulnerability was discovered by Kai Lu of Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs.

IPS Subscription

Fortinet customers who subscribe to Fortinet's intrusion prevention (IPS) service should be protected against this vulnerability with the appropriate configuration parameters in place. Fortinet's IPS service is one component of FortiGuard Subscription Services, which also offer comprehensive solutions such as antivirus, Web content filtering and antispam capabilities. These services enable protection against threats on both application and network layers. FortiGuard Services are continuously updated by FortiGuard Labs, which enables Fortinet to deliver a combination of multi-layered security intelligence and true zero-day protection from new and emerging threats. These updates are delivered to all FortiGate, FortiMail and FortiClient products. Fortinet strictly follows responsible disclosure guidelines to ensure optimum protection during a threat's lifecycle.