LogicLibrary Friday announced it has uncovered a potential security vulnerability in the Trillian instant-messaging client, produced by Cerulean Studios. The consequences of this vulnerability could range from an inconvenient program shut-down to a malicious hacker being able to gain control of a computer's operating system  .
Trillian is an all-in-one instant messaging client used by over a million people on Windows operating systems. Supporting AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and IRC, Trillian allows users to be on several instant-message and chat networks at the same time, using just a single client.
Its extensible plug-in system, for services such as AIM, Yahoo, MSN and RSS, connects to an external Web server at various points. LogicLibrary's BugScan, an automated application-security analysis technology, discovered a buffer iteration overflow in Trillian's handling of HTTP 1.1 response headers in several of these plug-in components.
The vulnerability originally appeared in Trillian 2.0. It was compounded because the same vulnerable code was included in several different components and locations. Although many instances of the bug were addressed in Trillian 3.0, at least two vulnerabilities persisted in the Yahoo IM component.
According to LogicLibrary, these exploitable unbounded buffer-iteration problems remain in the current product version, Trillian 3.1. There are at least two exploitable yahoo.dll buffer iteration bugs -- one is at 0x520296c6 and the other is at 0x5201a05f.
Buffer overflows can result in arbitrary malicious code being executed on a vulnerable computer. An attacker can potentially gain control over the system being attacked, putting items such as private documents, sensitive financial information and e-mail at risk.
It is recommended that Trillian users update their version to the latest 3.1 release and avoid using the Yahoo IM component until Trillian issues a patch.
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