Vulnerability Spotlight: Power Software PowerISO ISO Code Execution Vulnerabilities

These vulnerabilities were discovered by Piotr Bania of Cisco Talos.

Today, Talos is releasing details of a new vulnerability discovered within the Power Software PowerISO disk imaging software. TALOS-2017-0318 and TALOS-2017-0324 may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code remotely on the vulnerable system when a specially crafted ISO image is opened and parsed by the PowerISO software.

Overview

The vulnerabilities are present in the Power Software PowerISO disk imaging utility, used by Windows users to create, edit, mount and convert various popular disk image file formats. The software is commonly used by home users to mount ISO disk images since this capability is not included by default in Windows versions prior to version 8.

ISO (9660) disk image format is a file system within a single file. Essentially, it is a binary copy of the file system used by the standard software CD-ROM installation disks. Today, most of the installation disks for popular software and operating systems are distributed using the ISO file format.