As part of today’s monthly patch day, Microsoft fixed an issue I reported in September 2012 around (ASP).NET and SharePoint.

The vulnerability opens a new type of attack surface on ASP.NET if a given precondition regarding the Viewstate field is met. The impact is at least a breach of data integrity on the server side resulting typically in a denial of service. Leveraging the flaw to achieve remote code execution cannot be excluded though. The default configuration settings of ASP.NET are safe and do not allow an exploitation of the flaw.

But before uncovering more technical details about the issue, we want to ensure everyone had enough time to patch their servers adequately. For this reason, we will withhold further details during a grace period agreed with Microsoft’s Security Response Center to ensure all involved parties have enough time to react. In the meantime, we encourage you to patch the relevant servers and ensure your web applications at least enforce the default protection of the Viewstate field.