A Type Confusion vulnerability was found in the Spotlight RPC functions in afpd in Netatalk 3.1.x before 3.1.17. When parsing Spotlight RPC packets, one encoded data structure is a key-value style dictionary where the keys are character strings, and the values can be any of the supported types in the underlying protocol. Due to a lack of type checking in callers of the dalloc_value_for_key() function, which returns the object associated with a key, a malicious actor may be able to fully control the value of the pointer and theoretically achieve Remote Code Execution on the host. This issue is similar to CVE-2023-34967.

This vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on affected installations of Netatalk. Authentication is not required to exploit this vulnerability. The specific flaw exists within the dsi_writeinit function. The issue results from the lack of proper validation of the length of user-supplied data prior to copying it to a fixed-length heap-based buffer. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of root. Was ZDI-CAN-17646.

Netatalk through 3.1.13 has an afp_getappl heap-based buffer overflow resulting in code execution via a crafted .appl file. This provides remote root access on some platforms such as FreeBSD (used for TrueNAS).

The combination of primitives offered by SMB and AFP in their default configuration allows the arbitrary writing of files. By exploiting these combination of primitives, an attacker can execute arbitrary code.