LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 16, 2004

The Grumpy Editor's guide to presentation programs

This article is part of the LWN Grumpy Editor series.

A sad, but common experience in the 1990's was to see presentations at Linux conferences which were clearly done with PowerPoint. When Linux advocates need to use a 100% proprietary system to communicate with their audience, something is clearly wrong. Fortunately, those days are behind us, and PowerPoint only makes appearances in irrelevant corners at Linux events - LinuxWorld keynotes, for example.

Your editor has given a fair number of talks this year in a number of exotic locales, and that trend looks set to continue. So presentation software is an area of interest; it is time to look at the current state of the art. Your editor has found that, while the situation is better than it has ever been, there is still room for improvement.

For what it is worth, here are some of the criteria which are to be used when evaluating free presentation systems:

• The visual quality of the output. One assumes that the audience will actually look at the slides when not heckling the speaker over IRC, so the appearance of the slides will affect the overall impression left by the talk. So things like clean transitions and antialiased fonts are important.

• Responsiveness. If the speaker has to wait for the next slide to appear on the screen, something is wrong.

• Random access. Questions from the audience can require moving around quickly in the talk; the presentation program should provide random access to any slide without a lot of trouble.

• Easy creation of slides. It is bad enough to be finishing a talk, with a hangover, an hour before it is supposed to be presented. If the presentation system makes slide creation slow or laborious, such a situation can become intolerable. It should be possible to bash out slides - especially simple slides, with a minimum of effort.

• Control. It should be possible to get rid of all those bullets, achieve decent inter-line spacing, set code in a monospace font, etc. without great effort.

• HTML output. People like it when the slides from a talk are posted to the web; this should be a straightforward operation.

One thing which is not on your editor's list is nine-step special-effects dominated slide transitions, trapeze-act bullet points, bouncing penguins, etc. In your editor's grumpy opinion, such effects can only serve to distract attention from the actual substance of the talk. Good presentations can only be harmed by turning the slides into a cartoon show, and bad presentations cannot be saved that way.

There are two fundamental approaches to presentation programs: graphical editors and markup languages. Your editor found two active projects of each type; we'll start with the graphical entries.

KPresenter

KPresenter is the KDE project's presentation package. It has come a long way in recent years, becoming a powerful, fully-featured system with something for just about everybody. Basic text is easy to enter, with nice fonts and full control over presentation. Spell checking is built into the application. There is a simple drawing capability which includes the ability to make connections between objects - a crucial feature when presenting this week's new organization chart. Objects can be rotated and have drop shadows added on to them.

KPresenter can import images in numerous formats - including PostScript and SVG. Tables and charts can be generated with a simple, spreadsheet-like data editor. It is also possible to import various KOffice objects directly. If you present a lot of pie charts, this package is for you. If you want animations and singing, dancing transitions, KPresenter will provide them for you as well.

There is a basic set of templates which can be used to control the overall formatting of presentations. The first time you use KPresenter, it can be a little hard to figure out how to quickly make it add a new slide with the same template - but it is possible. A "preview" window on the left side can be used to navigate through the slides while editing them.

KPresenter works as one would expect when presenting; the output quality is good, and the program is responsive. A quick right-click brings up a list of slides for random movement. KPresenter also offers a "drawing mode," which lets the presenter scribble on the slides with a mouse. As a nice touch, KPresenter makes the pointer disappear while presenting. It's surprising how few presenters think to move the pointer to a corner, and give their entire talk with an unrelated arrow in the middle of their text; with KPresenter, they need not worry about that little detail.

Generation of HTML with KPresenter is a matter of stepping through a set of dialogs allowing customization of the output. HTML configurations can be saved, making things easier the second time. The quality of the output is good.

Your editor, working with the Fedora Rawhide packaging of KPresenter 1.3.2, encountered a few occasional bugs. Try to create a presentation with the wrong template, and the whole thing just silently quits. There are minor annoyances: when editing presentations, it is nice if the tab key increases the bullet level, but KPresenter does not work that way. The online documentation is spotty, with detailed tutorials on some relatively simple operations, but no help for more obscure topics, such us using the "autoform" feature.

Those issues are all minor, however. KPresenter is clearly a mature and capable package for the creation of presentations. If it were the only option available for free systems, we would be in good shape.

OpenOffice.org

One of the many features built into OpenOffice.org is a presentation package. Like KPresenter, OOo is a fully graphical editor, and it, too, is packed with features.

If you want to make fancy drawings, OOo is even more feature-rich than KPresenter. It has various types of curve drawing operations, and a set of three-dimensional objects as well. If you are giving a talk which relies heavily on 3D, ray-traced cones and toruses, OOo is the package for you. It can do connections between objects. The graph editor also looks very similar; type your data into the spreadsheet window (or import an OpenOffice spreadsheet) and any sort of 3D plot is available to you. There is a brutally long list of available slide transitions.

OpenOffice offers a number of ways of viewing and navigating through a presentation while working on it. A small set of tabs on the bottom of the window is one such view; to make the tabs useful, however, the user must explicitly set the title which appears on each one. There is an "outline view" which lists the bullet points as text, a "slide view" for seeing the presentation in thumbnail format, and a "notes view" which presents additional speaker notes.

The presentation mode works mostly as expected. It is possible to pull up the navigator and move to an arbitrary slide, but you must know that F5 is the magic key to hit. Some of the slide transitions and bullet effects, if, for some reason, you choose to use them, can take a long time and do not appear to be interruptible. There is a rehearsal mode which puts a stopwatch on the screen so you can see how long each slide takes - but it does not seem to time the entire presentation. There is no on-screen drawing mode.

OpenOffice has a dialog-driven HTML export mechanism which allows customization of almost every aspect of the output and works reasonably well. The program can also export to PDF, but it seems to get confused by animated text effects - yet another good reason to avoid them. The PDF output also seems to lack many of the graphical objects in the slides; instead, it contains only the text.

OpenOffice.org differs from KPresenter in one key aspect: how templates are handled. KPresenter generates each page from the template at insertion time; thereafter, the page is disconnected from the template. OpenOffice, instead, derives pages from a "master" page, and keeps that connection. As a result, changes affecting the layout of the entire presentation can by made by editing the master pages. With KPresenter, instead, it is necessary to change each page individually.

Anybody who has worked with OpenOffice.org knows that it is a large, unwieldy program. Once it gets going, it responds reasonably well, however. Once again, the online documentation is not all that one might hope for. If you want text with drop shadows, OpenOffice will disappoint you. If you want a capable, graphical presentation package, however, OpenOffice can certainly fill the bill.

MagicPoint

MagicPoint takes a very different approach to the problem of editing presentations. This tool (along with Pointless, which we will get to shortly) is based on plain text files and a custom markup language. Editing of slides is done with an ordinary text editor; the resulting file must be fed to the utility to see the final result.

To many, this approach will seem like something straight out of the 1970's. There are advantages to doing things this way, however: the creation of simple, textual presentations can be done very quickly, and the plain text input file can provide extensive control over how the presentation works. Purists will tell you that the markup approach helps to focus the mind on the structure of the presentation rather than its appearance. That may be true, but presentations are also very much about appearance, so users of markup-based presentation programs usually end up checking the formatting of their slides frequently as they write them.

MagicPoint's markup language takes a bit of getting used to. There is a simple template for each page which describes how each line should be formatted. In a typical MagicPoint presentation, the first line of a slide is blank, the second holds the title, the third is blank, and the slide text starts on the fourth line. Bullet levels are determined by the number of tabs at the beginning of the line. The result is that a MagicPoint input file tends to look like an outline of the talk with a bit of markup language thrown in.

The markup language is fairly straightforward: %page to start a page, %font to change fonts, etc. MagicPoint can use TrueType fonts for high-quality output. If you change fonts frequently (using monospace fonts for code fragments, for example), MagicPoint's markup can get verbose and cumbersome; otherwise it is pretty unobtrusive. There is simple support for background images or gradients. There are no operations for creating graphics in slides beyond drawing solid rectangles, but MagicPoint can easily display images stored in external files. So, to create a slide with graphics, one need only fire up one's favorite editing tool and export the result as a PNG file.

In presentation mode, MagicPoint behaves much like the others. It has an on-screen drawing mode, and supports easy random access to slides. There is an option to put up a footer giving the titles of the next and previous slides - useful for speakers who have a hard time remembering what's coming next. MagicPoint also offers a rehearsal mode where it continually shows how much of your allotted time has been used.

Generating an HTML version of a talk is a simple matter of running MagicPoint with the right command line options. There is, however, little flexibility in how that output is formatted.

MagicPoint is not a fast-moving project; the last release (1.10a) came out in June, 2003; 1.09 was released in September, 2001. In other words, not much is going on there. The lack of activity is somewhat surprising, given that there are many MagicPoint users out there. This tool has, evidently, reached the point where it is good enough; there is nothing so irritating that it inspires people to tear into the code. MagicPoint does have some bugs, some difficult features, and other issues - for example, fonts can make presentations hard to move between machines. It would be nice if this useful tool were to get some renewed developer attention.

(Those interested in MagicPoint input and output can see the editor's OLS 2004 talk and get a tarball with the sources and images that go with it.)

Pointless

Pointless is another markup-based presentation tool; it runs on most Linux and Unix systems. Your editor's first impression was that the Pointless developers are trying to build a system around a sort of object-oriented version of LaTeX. Pointless takes some getting used to, and is in an early stage of development, but it shows some real potential. Unfortunately, development appears to have stalled since the beginning of this year.

Users of Pointless end up typing in a lot of markup. Each bulleted line must be marked with =item, =subitem, etc. Plain text lines need =par, or are marked by a =begin-par/=end-par pair. Font and color changes follow a TeX-like style ({=small some-text}), and are a bit easier than the MagicPoint equivalents. Commands exist for importing images, setting tables, importing fonts, etc. There is also a macro definition capability which can be used isolate slide formatting decisions and cut down on the typing.

Pointless is written in Python, and it has made Python's module importing capability available to presentation files. The distribution comes with additional modules which can display EPS images or LaTeX source, create plots with gnuplot, or format source code.

There is one visual effect supported by pointless - a basic alpha fade out and in. It uses that effect everywhere, however, and it can make the rendering of slides quite slow. Commands exist for controlling the fader, but an attempt to use them (uncommenting the versions in an example presentation packaged with the source) resulted in Python tracebacks. Actually, crashing Pointless 0.5 is an easy thing to do in general.

Random access to slides during a presentation is not supported, and there is no drawing mode. Annoyingly, Pointless forces a pause before every bulleted item in each slide, requiring the speaker to lean on the space bar and watch each line fade in separately. This behavior can be changed by putting in =nostep - before every single line.

HTML output is supported. The mechanism is flexible; it works from templates and can substitute in many variable describing each slide. There is no "just make me some HTML" operation, however; the user must specify three different templates before Pointless will do the job.

Pointless has the potential to be come a highly-capable, extensible presentation system. For the moment, it remains - as stated on its web page - an alpha-phase project. Unless development picks up again, unfortunately, it is likely to remain there.

Summary

As always, there are some other projects which were not reviewed here, but which are worthy of mention:

• Agnubis is another attempt to create a GNOME presentation program. It would appear that development stalled in 2002, however, and the project, while having put up some screenshots, has never made an actual release. One of the authors posted a why agnubis did not succeed message in 2003.

• Criawips appears to be the current GNOME effort in this area. Version 0.0.7 was announced on September 9. Some screenshots are up, but little features like "creating and editing of slides" are yet to be implemented.

• Imposter is a standalone viewer for presentations made with OpenOffice.org.

• MinDia appears to be an active project. Its focus is on display of photography, however, rather than the creation of presentations.

• tpp is a markup-based presentation system which uses ncurses for its display. If you need to run presentations on a vt100 terminal, this system is for you.

So which package would a grumpy editor choose? On the graphical side, OpenOffice.org comes through as being more mature, and its "master page" mechanism can come in handy when one's employer is acquired and all of the page footers have to be changed at once. From the outside, however, KPresenter looks like a more vibrant, fast-moving project. Your editor also likes the feel of KPresenter better; OpenOffice, while being capable of almost anything, has always seemed unwieldy and aggravating to operate. OpenOffice should not be written off by any means, but KPresenter looks like it may be set to surpass it.

On the markup-based front, MagicPoint appears to be the only viable alternative at this point. Your editor will likely stick to it despite its slow-moving development and fairly primitive state. It has the features your editor really needs, and it does better at staying out of the way than any other system out there.

There seems to be a bit of a gap in the development of free presentation programs. The pointy-haired set, which wants sound effects, dancing bullet points, and easy pie charts, appears to be reasonably well served by the available graphical offerings. There is less available for those who prefer no-nonsense, text-centered presentations, quick talk preparation, easy display of code samples, and who are not afraid of a text editor. And the GNOME project, despite a few attempts (remember Achtung?) has yet to produce a presentation system of its own.

Projects in this area seem to have a high probability of stalling before reaching a stable state. Perhaps the problem is more difficult than it seems at the outset.

That said, the state of the art is clearly better than it has ever been; anybody wanting to do a presentation with free software has a few alternatives to choose from. There is no longer any need to face the embarrassment of being caught using PowerPoint at a Linux conference.

[As a postscript, your editor would like to let it be known that he has not forgotten his promise to complete the email client series with a look at terminal-based tools. That article is still in the works, and will show up, hopefully, before too long.]

Comments (55 posted)

Open Source Solaris?

As reported by News.com: Sun will release Solaris 10 under an open source license by the end of the year. Sun evidently wants to create a project around Solaris similar to the Fedora effort. There are numerous ways of viewing this announcement; in the absence of much in the way of real details, one might as well succumb to the temptation to apply a significant amount of imagination.

From a cynical viewpoint, one can argue that Sun is just acting from commercial desperation. By putting Solaris out there, the company hopes to attract attention, divert some developer and user interest from Linux, and, with luck, dump some of its development and maintenance load onto the community. Such a move would seem destined to failure; Sun's ability to "get" free software has been mixed at best in recent years, and the company is in no position to take a leadership position there now.

The paranoid among us wait, with trepidation, for Sun to specify a license for the code it is releasing. At best, they fear, Solaris will be managed like Java; source will be available, but the code will be managed with an iron hand and there will be no opportunity for a true community to come together around Solaris. In a worst-case scenario, the Solaris license will not only forbid any sort of cross-pollination with the truly free operating systems, but it will also "taint" any developer who looks at the Solaris code. A license which attempts to forbid the transfer of code, algorithms, techniques, etc. outside of Solaris could be fodder for the next round of unpleasant lawsuits. Remember that Solaris is based on SCO-owned code, Sun obtained options on SCO stock last year, and Sun dumped several million dollars into the SCO Group for "licensing fees" as well. The relationship between these two companies never has been explained in a satisfactory way.

The optimistic observer, instead, will hope that Solaris goes out with a GPL-compatible license. At that point, Solaris becomes another free Unix system, alongside the various BSD projects. Useful code in Solaris can be incorporated into other systems, and Solaris, too, can benefit from code and ideas found in the other free systems. Solaris users will know that their operating system can remain viable well into the future, regardless of what happens to Sun. And the free software community will be that much richer.

The gray-bearded True Unix People would still rather have the source for SunOS 4 (or even SunOS 3) and to heck with Solaris.

Until Sun tells us exactly what it plans to do, with an emphasis on which code will be released and under which license, it is hard to say with any certainty what the Solaris release will mean. Things could go in almost any direction. We're most curious to see what Sun comes up with; hopefully they will not make us wait too long before filling in the details.

Comments (4 posted)

What is KDE e.V. for?

Little is known or said about the KDE e.V., the registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Project in legal and financial matters. Created to deal with various problems faced by a young free software project, the e.V. maintains a low profile and tries to merely protect the project, but is faced with demands for a greater role, as well as accusations of it being too closed. This article sets out to disambiguate the e.V.'s role, and what it means for KDE contributors and the wider free software community, from the point of view of a writer who works with the KDE Project but who is neither a member of the KDE e.V. nor a spokesperson for the KDE e.V. in any way.

Since the KDE e.V.'s pages on the KDE web site are relatively uninformative, I took the opportunity to talk to the Treasurer, Mirko Böhm, while attending the KDE World Summit "aKademy". He began by explaining the history of the organization. It started with three people in 1996 to solve two problems faced by the KDE Project: the need for legal validity when taking donations, and the concerns about the Qt licensing model that, at the time, wasn't Free and could have seriously damaged KDE. To cut a long story short, by late 1997, some German members of the project registered the KDE e.V. with the German Association Registry. In 1998 the KDE e.V. and Trolltech created the KDE Free Qt Foundation whose purpose was "to secure the availability of the Qt toolkit for the development of Free Software".

So from its start the key goals of KDE e.V. were to provide legal and financial representation for the project. But it is more proactive than those simple aims suggest. They provide an avenue for donations, they help promotion efforts, they organize conferences, and just as Linus Torvalds registered the trademark for Linux, so the KDE e.V. took control of the KDE trademark, to protect and promote the identity of the project. For KDE contributors, this means that they can use the legal and financial backing of the KDE e.V. to pursue trademark disputes. For the wider world this means that the KDE Project can force you to remove references to their trademarks from your work from them if they don't like it. Of course the KDE e.V. only intends to attack those who seek to damage the KDE Project through trademark infringement - it isn't going to stop people saying their work is a KDE application for the sake of it - but with this power comes the need for clarity regarding who is responsible and accountable.

Aware of the problems this might cause in a community based upon individual and community freedom, KDE e.V. claims to operate as an open membership organization. Rather than being run by companies and sponsors, as many other similar organizations are, the KDE e.V. is controlled by contributing members (i.e. contributors, documenters, artists, etc.). The idea is that the organization is run for free software contributors by free software contributors. Yet the membership process is still not entirely open, requiring that one existing member nominate you, and two further members support your nomination, which the Board of Directors then accepts. Enthusiastic users who feel they have a stake in the KDE e.V.'s decisions are excluded, as may be unpopular contributors. Furthermore the membership mailing list is closed, as are membership meetings, meaning that the free software community can only learn of the proceedings of the KDE e.V. through officially sanctioned channels.

For Rob Kaper, a KDE contributor who claims his views are not uncommon in the community, these closed channels are not always necessary nor useful. Whilst he recognizes that some matters such as financial reports should be kept private, he told me that the KDE e.V. membership should be calling "for a distinction between truly private matters and the aspects of true open source development". In particular he objects to the private-by-default membership mailing list, subscription moderated development mailing lists (he gave the example of khtml-devel) and the closed KDE.News editors, kde-security and kde-packager mailing lists. He sees a trend that he told me "is largely being ignored by the eV membership".'

Both the KDE e.V. Board of Directors, who are elected by the membership with terms of three years, and the membership itself might well reject some of these claims. Each decision to close an area of the project from the public is made by the contributors concerned, not the KDE e.V., and so the closed areas represent the concerns of the contributors. Of course Kaper would contend that contributors should be making things more open, not more closed, but then that becomes a separate matter of how free software projects manage themselves.

As Mirko pointed out to me, it isn't the place of the KDE e.V. to dictate how development and PR efforts ought to be conducted. One of the guiding principles of the KDE e.V. is to separate politics from development, although Mirko acknowledged that this isn't always possible. In this year's membership meeting at aKademy, for example, the membership voted to have the Board of Directors adopt a position on software patents that will allow contributors to stick to their work without worrying that KDE is sitting on the fence on such a crucial issue. And in the matter of closed mailing lists, whilst the e.V. membership can discuss the issue, it is more a matter of pragmatism. For Kaper though "the e.V. should protect KDE from efforts to control that kind of free flow of information", which "it can only do ... when it adopts more open policies itself". Doing this would mean a major expansion in the scope and power of the e.V. over contributors.

These minor disputes put the KDE e.V. in an awkward position. It wants to leave the project to develop according to the regulation of the GPL and their policy of letting the best code decide. Yet there seem to be issues where consensus will not arise naturally, where the project requires a space in which these issues can be debated and consensus can be built. When I asked Mirko about the future of the organization, he admitted that they don't have a clear idea of how it might evolve - that is up to the membership. Whether it is appropriate that the KDE e.V. expand its current role beyond that of protecting and promoting the project is undecided, as is whether or not its current activities and policies properly fulfill that role.

For KDE contributors it is a debate that needs to be engaged, and one that will hopefully result in a democratic vision of the organization's future. All contributors should understand and be part of that process. For KDE users and the wider free software community there is little scope for input, except through public debate that might influence the KDE e.V. membership. It is nonetheless an interesting experiment in running a formal entity that can represent a fairly anarchic community project, and so we will continue to benefit from their experiences.

Comments (4 posted)

Page editor: Jonathan Corbet

Security

Security news

cdrecord trouble

Making sweeping statements about the security of a particular program can come back to haunt you rather quickly as the recent case of a local root exploit in cdrecord demonstrates. During a discussion of recent changes in the 2.6 Linux kernel (as covered by LWN), Jörg Schilling, the author of cdrecord, made a comment about the security of that program:

That statement could well be true, but in making it, Jörg may have inspired someone to take a closer look at cdrecord. Max Vozeler recently found that cdrecord fails to drop privileges when it executes an external program, and that users can specify which external program is run via the RSH environment variable. If cdrecord is installed setuid root, any local user can exploit this vulnerability to gain root access; multiple exploits have already been posted on bugtraq.

Jörg recommends installing cdrecord as a setuid root. cdrecord uses the elevated privileges to lock its buffers into physical memory and to request real-time scheduling, both of which reduce the chances of a buffer underrun. In addition, cdrecord opens the SCSI device before dropping privileges back to that of the user who executed it. In the case of a remote device, it executes the command to access that device, but prior to this bug being fixed, it did that with elevated privileges.

Other means for allowing non-root users to burn CDs do exist, but they are less secure, according to Jörg:

Another alternative, which is used by some distribution vendors (notably Red Hat and SuSE), is to disallow non-root users from burning CDs; clearly this is the most secure choice, but can be inconvenient for users and system administrators. Many administrators and some CD burning front end programs override this choice and, in this case, that could lead to a large security hole that may not be patched by the distribution. To avoid this possibility, some distributions have issued cdrecord updates even though they do not install the program in a setuid mode; see the LWN vulnerability entry for the current list.

Jörg has fixed this bug in the most recent version of his cdrtools package (2.01a38, available from his cdrecord page).

Comments (3 posted)

Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird security issues

The announcements for the new releases from the Mozilla project discussed new features at length, but were silent on one other point: those releases include fixes for a number of security vulnerabilities, some of which can lead to remote code execution. See this list of fixed vulnerabilities for several good reasons to upgrade.

Comments (none posted)

New vulnerabilities

apache2: IPv6 denial of service

Package(s):	httpd apache2	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0747 CAN-2004-0751 CAN-2004-0786 CAN-2004-0809
Created:	September 15, 2004	Updated:	October 6, 2004
Description:	Apache2 contains an integer error in the apr_uri_parse() function when handling IPv6 addresses. The result is a code execution vulnerability on BSD systems, and a denial of service vulnerability under Linux.
Alerts:	Debian DSA-558-1 2004-10-06 Trustix TSLSA-2004-0047 2004-09-16 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:096 2004-09-15 Gentoo 200409-21 2004-09-16 Fedora FEDORA-2004-308 2004-09-16 Fedora FEDORA-2004-307 2004-09-16 SuSE SUSE-SA:2004:032 2004-09-15 Red Hat RHSA-2004:463-01 2004-09-15

Comments (none posted)

cups: denial of service

Package(s):	cups cupsys	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0558
Created:	September 15, 2004	Updated:	October 14, 2004
Description:	Versions of cups prior to 1.1.21 contain a denial of service vulnerability in their IPP implementation. A malicious UDP packet can cause cups to stop listening to the IPP port.
Alerts:	Conectiva CLA-2004:872 2004-10-14 Fedora FEDORA-2004-275 2004-09-28 Slackware SSA:2004-266-01 2004-09-22 Whitebox WBSA-2004:449-01 2004-09-20 Gentoo 200409-25 2004-09-20 SuSE SUSE-SA:2004:031 2004-09-15 Red Hat RHSA-2004:449-01 2004-09-15 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:097 2004-09-15 Debian DSA-545-1 2004-09-15

Comments (none posted)

gtk2, gdk-pixbuf: buffer overflows

Package(s):	gdk-pixbuf gtk2	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0753 CAN-2004-0782 CAN-2004-0783 CAN-2004-0788
Created:	September 15, 2004	Updated:	February 25, 2005
Description:	The gdk-pixbuf and gtk2 libraries contain vulnerabilities in their handling of BMP and XPM files which can lead to denial of service and, potentially, code execution attacks.
Alerts:	Fedora-Legacy FLSA:2005 2005-02-23 Conectiva CLA-2004:875 2004-10-18 Slackware SSA:2004-266-02 2004-09-22 Gentoo 200409-28 2004-09-21 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:095-1 2004-09-17 SuSE SUSE-SA:2004:033 2004-09-17 Debian DSA-549-1 2004-09-17 Red Hat RHSA-2004:447-02 2004-09-15 Debian DSA-546-1 2004-09-16 Red Hat RHSA-2004:466-01 2004-09-15 Red Hat RHSA-2004:447-01 2004-09-15 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:095 2004-09-15 Fedora FEDORA-2004-289 2004-09-15 Fedora FEDORA-2004-288 2004-09-15 Fedora FEDORA-2004-287 2004-09-15 Fedora FEDORA-2004-286 2004-09-15

Comments (none posted)

OpenOffice: information disclosure

Package(s):	openoffice.org	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0752
Created:	September 15, 2004	Updated:	October 20, 2004
Description:	OpenOffice.org contains a temporary file handling vulnerability which can allow one local user to read the contents of another user's open files.
Alerts:	Gentoo 200410-17 2004-10-20 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:103 2004-09-27 Red Hat RHSA-2004:446-01 2004-09-15

Comments (none posted)

Samba: Denial of Service vulnerabilities

Package(s):	samba	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0807 CAN-2004-0808
Created:	September 13, 2004	Updated:	September 22, 2004
Description:	There is a defect in smbd's ASN.1 parsing. A bad packet received during the authentication request could throw newly-spawned smbd processes into an infinite loop (CAN-2004-0807). Another defect was found in nmbd's processing of mailslot packets, where a bad NetBIOS request could crash the nmbd process (CAN-2004-0808). See this advisory for details.
Alerts:	Red Hat RHSA-2004:467-01 2004-09-22 OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2004.040 2004-09-15 Trustix TSLSA-2004-0046 2004-09-14 Slackware SSA:2004-257-01 2004-09-13 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:092 2004-09-13 Fedora FEDORA-2004-305 2004-09-13 Fedora FEDORA-2004-304 2004-09-13 Gentoo 200409-16 2004-09-13

Comments (none posted)

SUS 2.0.2 local root vulnerability

Package(s):	SUS	CVE #(s):
Created:	September 14, 2004	Updated:	September 15, 2004
Description:	SUS is a suid root program that allows ordinary users the execution of certain programs with superuser privileges. SUS is run by default as setuid root. A simple format string bug in the log() function allows any local user to gain root privileges. See this BugTraq advisory for more information.
Alerts:	Gentoo 200409-17 2004-09-14

Comments (none posted)

Webmin, Usermin: Multiple vulnerabilities in Usermin

Package(s):	webmin usermin	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0559
Created:	September 13, 2004	Updated:	September 23, 2004
Description:	There is an input validation bug in the webmail feature of Usermin. Additionally, the Webmin and Usermin installation scripts write to /tmp/.webmin without properly checking if it exists first. The first vulnerability allows a remote attacker to inject arbitrary shell code in a specially-crafted e-mail. This could lead to remote code execution with the privileges of the user running Webmin or Usermin. The second could allow local users who know Webmin or Usermin is going to be installed to have arbitrary files be overwritten by creating a symlink by the name /tmp/.webmin that points to some target file, e.g. /etc/passwd.
Alerts:	Mandrake MDKSA-2004:101 2004-09-22 Debian DSA-544-1 2004-09-14 Gentoo 200409-15 2004-09-12

Comments (none posted)

Updated vulnerabilities

Apache mod_proxy: denial of service

Package(s):	apache	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0492
Created:	June 11, 2004	Updated:	October 14, 2004
Description:	A buffer overflow vulnerability in the apache mod_proxy module can be exploited to create a denial of service.
Alerts:	Fedora-Legacy FLSA:1737 2004-10-13 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:065 2004-06-29 Debian DSA-525-1 2004-06-24 Gentoo 200406-16 2004-06-21 OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2004.029 2004-06-11

Comments (none posted)

apache2: stack-based buffer overflow in ssl_util.c

Package(s):	apache2	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0488
Created:	June 1, 2004	Updated:	October 14, 2004
Description:	A stack-based buffer overflow exists in the ssl_util_uuencode_binary function in ssl_util.c in Apache. When mod_ssl is configured to trust the issuing CA, a remote attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code via a client certificate with a long subject DN.
Alerts:	Fedora-Legacy FLSA:1888 2004-10-13 Debian DSA-532-2 2004-07-27 Debian DSA-532-1 2004-07-22 Red Hat RHSA-2004:245-01 2004-06-14 Gentoo 200406-05 2004-06-09 Slackware SSA:2004-154-01 2004-06-02 OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2004.026 2004-05-27 Trustix TSLSA-2004-0031 2004-06-02 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:054 2004-06-01 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:055 2004-06-01

Comments (none posted)

aspell: bounds checking problem

Package(s):	aspell	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0548
Created:	June 17, 2004	Updated:	December 20, 2004
Description:	Aspell's word-list-compress utility fails to properly check bounds when dealing with words that are more than 256 bytes long. This can lead to arbitrary code execution by an attacker.
Alerts:	Mandrake MDKSA-2004:153 2004-12-20 OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2004.042 2004-09-15 Gentoo 200406-14 2004-06-17

Comments (none posted)

cdrecord: failure to drop privilege

Package(s):	cdrecord	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0806
Created:	September 8, 2004	Updated:	February 21, 2005
Description:	The cdrecord utility, which is installed setuid on some distributions, fails to drop privilege before running a user-specified program.
Alerts:	Fedora-Legacy FLSA:2058 2005-02-20 Gentoo 200409-18 2004-09-14 Fedora FEDORA-2004-298 2004-09-09 Fedora FEDORA-2004-297 2004-09-09 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:091 2004-09-07

Comments (none posted)

eGroupWare: cross site scripting vulnerabilities in modules

Package(s):	egroupware	CVE #(s):
Created:	September 2, 2004	Updated:	September 8, 2004
Description:	The eGroupWare has multiple vulnerabilities in the calendar, address book, messenger and ticket modules. An attacker can potentially execute script code and compromise the victim's browser.
Alerts:	Gentoo 200409-06 2004-09-02

Comments (none posted)

Filename disclosure vulnerability in fam

Package(s):	fam	CVE #(s):	CAN-2002-0875
Created:	August 19, 2002	Updated:	January 5, 2005
Description:	"fam" (file alteration monitor) watches files and directories for changes and lets interested applications know when something happens. This package has a flaw in its group handling that blocks some legitimate operations while, at the same time, exposing the names of files that should otherwise be invisible.
Alerts:	Red Hat RHSA-2005:005-01 2005-01-05 Debian DSA-154-1 2002-08-15

Comments (none posted)

flim: insecure file creation

Package(s):	flim	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0422
Created:	May 5, 2004	Updated:	December 16, 2004
Description:	The emacs "flim" mode creates temporary files in an insecure fashion, possibly allowing a local attacker to overwrite files.
Alerts:	Fedora FEDORA-2004-546 2004-12-15 Red Hat RHSA-2004:344-01 2004-08-18 Debian DSA-500-1 2004-05-01

Comments (none posted)

Gaim: remote code execution vulnerability

Package(s):	gaim	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0500
Created:	August 12, 2004	Updated:	October 18, 2004
Description:	The Gaim IRC client (versions 0.81 and prior) has a remote code execution vulnerability in the MSN-protocol parsing functions.
Alerts:	Fedora-Legacy FLSA:1237 2004-10-16 Whitebox WBSA-2004:400-01 2004-09-20 Slackware SSA:2004-239-01 2004-08-26 Fedora FEDORA-2004-279 2004-08-26 Fedora FEDORA-2004-278 2004-08-26 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:081 2004-08-12 SuSE SUSE-SA:2004:025 2004-08-12 Gentoo 200408-12 2004-08-12

Comments (none posted)

gallery: temp file vulnerability in upload code

Package(s):	gallery	CVE #(s):
Created:	September 2, 2004	Updated:	September 8, 2004
Description:	Gallery has a vulnerability with temp file handling in the upload code. An attacker can run arbitrary code as the user running PHP.
Alerts:	Gentoo 200409-05 2004-09-02

Comments (none posted)

glibc: Information leak with LD_DEBUG

Package(s):	glibc	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-1453
Created:	August 17, 2004	Updated:	May 26, 2005
Description:	Silvio Cesare discovered a potential information leak in glibc. It allows LD_DEBUG on SUID binaries where it should not be allowed. This has various security implications, which may be used to gain confidential information. An attacker can gain the list of symbols a SUID application uses and their locations and can then use a trojaned library taking precedence over those symbols to gain information or perform further exploitation.
Alerts:	Red Hat RHSA-2005:256-01 2005-05-18 Gentoo 200408-16 2004-08-16

Comments (1 posted)

gnome-vfs: backend script vulnerabilities

Package(s):	gnome-vfs	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0494
Created:	August 4, 2004	Updated:	February 21, 2005
Description:	Several scripts packaged with gnome-vfs, using its "extfs" capability, have security flaws. These scripts tend not to be used on many systems, but their presence can still be a threat.
Alerts:	Fedora-Legacy FLSA:1944 2005-02-20 Whitebox WBSA-2004:373-01 2004-08-19 Red Hat RHSA-2004:373-01 2004-08-04

Comments (none posted)

gtkhtml: malformed messages cause crash

Package(s):	gtkhtml	CVE #(s):	CAN-2003-0133 CAN-2003-0541
Created:	April 14, 2003	Updated:	April 18, 2005
Description:	GtkHTML is the HTML rendering widget used by the Evolution mail reader. GtkHTML supplied with versions of Evolution prior to 1.2.4 contain a bug when handling HTML messages. Alan Cox discovered that certain malformed messages could cause the Evolution mail component to crash.
Alerts:	Debian DSA-710-1 2005-04-18 Mandrake MDKSA-2003:093 2003-09-18 Conectiva CLA-2003:737 2003-09-12 Red Hat RHSA-2003:264-01 2003-09-09 Mandrake MDKSA-2003:046 2003-04-15 Red Hat RHSA-2003:126-01 2003-04-14

Comments (none posted)

httpd: mod_ssl input filter denial of service vulnerability

Package(s):	httpd	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0748
Created:	September 2, 2004	Updated:	September 23, 2004
Description:	Apache httpd has a denial of service vulnerability in mod_ssl in which an attacker can force an SSL connection to abort, resulting in the Apache child process entering an infinite loop. This affects httpd versions up to and including 2.0.50.
Alerts:	Fedora FEDORA-2004-313 2004-09-23 Conectiva CLA-2004:868 2004-09-23 SuSE SUSE-SA:2004:030 2004-09-06 Red Hat RHSA-2004:349-01 2004-09-01

Comments (none posted)

imlib2: buffer overflows

Package(s):	imlib2	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0802 CAN-2004-0817
Created:	September 8, 2004	Updated:	October 26, 2005
Description:	The imlib2 library contains buffer overflows in the BMP handling code.
Alerts:	Debian DSA-548-2 2005-10-26 Conectiva CLA-2004:870 2004-09-28 Debian DSA-552-1 2004-09-22 Debian DSA-548-1 2004-09-16 Red Hat RHSA-2004:465-01 2004-09-15 Gentoo 200409-12 2004-09-08 Fedora FEDORA-2004-301 2004-09-09 Fedora FEDORA-2004-300 2004-09-09 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:089 2004-09-07

Comments (none posted)

iproute: local denial of service

Package(s):	iproute net-tools	CVE #(s):	CAN-2003-0856
Created:	November 25, 2003	Updated:	December 14, 2004
Description:	The iproute utility is susceptible to spoofed netlink messages sent by local users, with the result that denial of service attacks are possible.
Alerts:	Mandrake MDKSA-2004:148 2004-12-13 Fedora FEDORA-2004-154 2004-06-03 Fedora FEDORA-2004-115 2004-05-11 Debian DSA-492-1 2004-04-18 Gentoo 200404-10 2004-04-09 Red Hat RHSA-2003:316-01 2003-11-24

Comments (none posted)

kdebase: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):	kdebase	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0689 CAN-2004-0690 CAN-2004-0721 CAN-2004-0746
Created:	August 12, 2004	Updated:	October 4, 2004
Description:	Three separate vulnerabilities have been identified in the KDE 3.2 "kdebase" package; see this advisory for details. These problems include two temporary file vulnerabilities and a "frame injection" problem in konqueror which could help with phishing attacks. In a fourth vulnerability, described here, Konqueror allows websites to set cookies for certain country specific secondary top level domains.
Alerts:	Red Hat RHSA-2004:412-01 2004-10-04 Conectiva CLA-2004:864 2004-09-13 Fedora FEDORA-2004-293 2004-09-08 Fedora FEDORA-2004-292 2004-09-08 Fedora FEDORA-2004-291 2004-09-08 Fedora FEDORA-2004-290 2004-09-08 Slackware SSA:2004-247-01 2004-09-03 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:086 2004-08-20 Debian DSA-539-1 2004-08-17 Gentoo 200408-13 2004-08-12

Comments (none posted)

kernel allows unauthorized changes to the group ID

Package(s):	kernel	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0497
Created:	July 2, 2004	Updated:	September 27, 2004
Description:	During an audit of the Linux kernel, SUSE discovered a flaw that allowed a user to make unauthorized changes to the group ID of files in certain circumstances - such as when the files are exported via NFS.
Alerts:	Conectiva CLA-2004:869 2004-09-27 Gentoo 200407-16 2004-07-22 Whitebox WBSA-2004:360-01 2004-07-07 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:066 2004-07-06 SuSE SUSE-SA:2004:020 2004-07-02 Fedora FEDORA-2004-206 2004-07-02 Fedora FEDORA-2004-205 2004-07-02 Red Hat RHSA-2004:354-01 2004-07-02 Red Hat RHSA-2004:360-01 2004-07-02

Comments (none posted)

kernel information leak

Package(s):	kernel	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0415
Created:	August 3, 2004	Updated:	October 26, 2004
Description:	Paul Starzetz discovered flaws in the Linux kernel when handling file offset pointers. These consist of invalid conversions of 64 to 32-bit file offset pointers and possible race conditions. A local unprivileged user could make use of these flaws to access large portions of kernel memory. Note that this vulnerability affects all 2.4 kernels through 2.4.26 and 2.6 kernels through 2.6.7. A fix for this problem was added to the fifth 2.4.27 release candidate.
Alerts:	Conectiva CLA-2004:879 2004-10-26 Fedora-Legacy FLSA:1804 2004-10-18 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:087 2004-08-26 Gentoo 200408-24 2004-08-25 Whitebox WBSA-2004:413-01 2004-08-19 Red Hat RHSA-2004:327-01 2004-08-18 Fedora FEDORA-2004-251 2004-08-10 Trustix TSLSA-2004-0041 2004-08-09 SuSE SUSE-SA:2004:024 2004-08-09 Red Hat RHSA-2004:413-01 2004-08-03 Red Hat RHSA-2004:418-01 2004-08-03 Fedora FEDORA-2004-247 2004-08-03

Comments (none posted)

kernel-utils: setuid vulnerability

Package(s):	kernel-utils	CVE #(s):	CAN-2003-0019
Created:	February 7, 2003	Updated:	January 21, 2005
Description:	The kernel-utils package contains several utilities that can be used to control the kernel or machine hardware. In Red Hat Linux 8.0 this package contains user mode linux (UML) utilities. The uml_net utility in kernel-utils packages with Red Hat Linux 8.0 was incorrectly shipped setuid root. This could allow local users to control certain network interfaces, add and remove arp entries and routes, and put interfaces in and out of promiscuous mode. All users of the kernel-utils package should update to these packages that contain a version of uml_net that is not setuid root. Alternatively, as a work-around to this vulnerability issue the following command as root: chmod -s /usr/bin/uml_net
Alerts:	Red Hat RHSA-2003:056-08 2003-02-07

Comments (none posted)

krb5: double-free and ASN.1 parsing

Package(s):	krb5	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0642 CAN-2004-0643 CAN-2004-0644 CAN-2004-0772
Created:	August 31, 2004	Updated:	September 21, 2004
Description:	Several double-free bugs were found in the Kerberos 5 KDC and libraries. A remote attacker could potentially exploit these flaws to execute arbitrary code. See CAN-2004-0642, CAN-2004-0643 and CAN-2004-0772. An infinite loop bug was found in the Kerberos 5 ASN.1 decoder library. A remote attacker may be able to trigger this flaw and cause a denial of service. See CAN-2004-0644. See this CERT advisory for additional information.
Alerts:	Whitebox WBSA-2004:350-01 2004-09-20 OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2004.039 2004-09-13 Conectiva CLA-2004:860 2004-09-09 Gentoo 200409-09 2004-09-06 Trustix TSLSA-2004-0045 2004-09-02 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:088 2004-08-31 Debian DSA-543-1 2004-08-31 Fedora FEDORA-2004-277 2004-08-31 Fedora FEDORA-2004-276 2004-08-31 Red Hat RHSA-2004:350-01 2004-08-31 Red Hat RHSA-2004:448-01 2004-08-31

Comments (none posted)

lha: stack-based buffer overflow

Package(s):	lha	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0769 CAN-2004-0771 CAN-2004-0694 CAN-2004-0745
Created:	September 2, 2004	Updated:	October 14, 2004
Description:	The lha archiving and compression utility has a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability. A modified archive could allow an attacker to execute code when a victim extracts or test the archive.
Alerts:	Fedora-Legacy FLSA:1833 2004-10-13 Whitebox WBSA-2004:323-01 2004-09-20 Gentoo 200409-13 2004-09-08 Fedora FEDORA-2004-295 2004-09-08 Fedora FEDORA-2004-294 2004-09-08 Red Hat RHSA-2004:323-01 2004-09-01

Comments (none posted)

libpng: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):	libpng	CVE #(s):	CAN-2002-1363 CAN-2004-0597 CAN-2004-0598 CAN-2004-0599
Created:	August 4, 2004	Updated:	February 10, 2005
Description:	There is yet another set of holes in libpng, versions 1.2.5 and prior, which can be exploited by a malicious image file; see this advisory from Chris Evans or this CERT advisory for details.
Alerts:	Fedora-Legacy FLSA:1943 2005-02-08 Red Hat RHSA-2004:421-01 2004-08-04 Gentoo 200408-22 2004-08-23 Whitebox WBSA-2004:402-01 2004-08-19 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:082 2004-08-12 Slackware SSA:2004-223-01 2004-08-09 Slackware SSA:2004-223-02 2004-08-07 Slackware SSA:2004-222-01b 2004-08-10 Slackware SSA:2004-222-01 2004-08-07 Conectiva CLA-2004:856 2004-08-06 Trustix TSLSA-2004-0040 2004-08-05 Gentoo 200408-03 2004-08-05 Debian DSA-536-1 2004-08-04 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:079 2004-08-04 SuSE SUSE-SA:2004:023 2004-08-04 Red Hat RHSA-2004:402-01 2004-08-04 OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2004.035 2004-08-04

Comments (1 posted)

logcheck: symlink vulnerability

Package(s):	logcheck	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0404
Created:	April 21, 2004	Updated:	December 22, 2004
Description:	The logcheck utility handles temporary files in an unsafe way, possibly allowing local attackers to overwrite files.
Alerts:	Mandrake MDKSA-2004:155 2004-12-22 Debian DSA-488-1 2004-04-16

Comments (none posted)

Midnight Commander: extfs vfs vulnerability

Package(s):	mc	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0494
Created:	September 2, 2004	Updated:	January 5, 2005
Description:	Midnight Commander has a vfs vulnerability with shell quoting in extfs perl scripts.
Alerts:	Red Hat RHSA-2004:464-02 2005-01-05 Red Hat RHSA-2004:464-01 2004-09-15 Fedora FEDORA-2004-273 2004-09-01 Fedora FEDORA-2004-272 2004-09-01

Comments (none posted)

mikmod: buffer overflow

Package(s):	mikmod	CVE #(s):	CAN-2003-0427
Created:	June 16, 2003	Updated:	June 16, 2005
Description:	Ingo Saitz discovered a bug in mikmod whereby a long filename inside an archive file can overflow a buffer when the archive is being read by mikmod.
Alerts:	Fedora FEDORA-2005-405 2005-06-16 Red Hat RHSA-2005:506-01 2005-06-13 Fedora FEDORA-2005-404 2005-06-09 Gentoo 200307-01 2003-07-02 Debian DSA-320-1 2003-06-13

Comments (none posted)

mod_python: denial of service vulnerability

Package(s):	mod_python	CVE #(s):	CAN-2003-0973
Created:	January 27, 2004	Updated:	October 4, 2004
Description:	Apache's mod_python module could crash the httpd process if a specific, malformed query string was sent. The Apache Foundation has reported that mod_python may be prone to Denial of Service attacks when handling a malformed query. Mod_python 2.7.9 was released to fix the vulnerability, however, because the vulnerability has not been fully fixed, version 2.7.10 has been released. Users of mod_python 3.0.4 are not affected by this vulnerability.
Alerts:	Fedora-Legacy FLSA:1325 2004-10-03 Conectiva CLA-2004:837 2004-04-12 Whitebox WBSA-2004:058-01 2004-03-01 Debian DSA-452-1 2004-02-29 Red Hat RHSA-2004:058-01 2004-02-26 Red Hat RHSA-2004:063-01 2004-02-26 Gentoo 200401-03 2004-01-27

Comments (none posted)

mpg321: format string vulnerability

Package(s):	mpg321	CVE #(s):	CAN-2003-0969
Created:	January 6, 2004	Updated:	March 28, 2005
Description:	A vulnerability was discovered in mpg321, a command-line mp3 player, whereby user-supplied strings were passed to printf(3) unsafely. This vulnerability could be exploited by a remote attacker to overwrite memory, and possibly execute arbitrary code. In order for this vulnerability to be exploited, mpg321 would need to play a malicious mp3 file (including via HTTP streaming).
Alerts:	Gentoo 200503-34 2005-03-28 Debian DSA-411-1 2004-01-05

Comments (none posted)

multi-gnome-terminal: Information leak

Package(s):	multi-gnome-terminal	CVE #(s):
Created:	September 6, 2004	Updated:	September 8, 2004
Description:	multi-gnome-terminal contains debugging code that has been known to output active keystrokes to a potentially unsafe location. Output has been seen to show up in the '.xsession-errors' file in the users home directory. Since this file is world-readable on many machines, this bug has the potential to leak sensitive information to anyone using the system. Any authorized user on the local machine has the ability to read any critical data that has been entered into the terminal, including passwords.
Alerts:	Gentoo 200409-10 2004-09-06

Comments (none posted)

neon: buffer overflow

Package(s):	neon	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0398
Created:	May 19, 2004	Updated:	September 30, 2004
Description:	The neon library (through version 0.24.5) contains a buffer overflow in its date parsing code, allowing arbitrary code execution when connecting to a hostile server. See this advisory for details. This vulnerability also affects related applications (such as cadaver).
Alerts:	Fedora-Legacy FLSA:1552 2004-09-29 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:078 2004-07-29 Gentoo 200406-03 2004-06-05 Gentoo 200405-25b 2004-06-02 Gentoo 200405-25 2004-05-30 Conectiva CLA-2004:841 2004-05-25 Gentoo 200405-15 2004-05-20 Gentoo 200405-13 2004-05-20 OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2004.024 2004-05-19 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:049 2004-05-19 Fedora FEDORA-2004-130 2004-05-19 Fedora FEDORA-2004-129 2004-05-19 Red Hat RHSA-2004:191-01 2004-05-19 Debian DSA-507-1 2004-05-19 Debian DSA-506-1 2004-05-19

Comments (none posted)

netpbm: insecure temporary files

Package(s):	netpbm	CVE #(s):	CAN-2003-0924
Created:	January 19, 2004	Updated:	December 29, 2004
Description:	netpbm is graphics conversion toolkit made up of a large number of single-purpose programs. Many of these programs were found to create temporary files in an insecure manner, which could allow a local attacker to overwrite files with the privileges of the user invoking a vulnerable netpbm tool.
Alerts:	Conectiva CLA-2004:909 2004-12-29 Gentoo 200410-02 2004-10-04 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:011-1 2004-09-27 Whitebox WBSA-2004:031-01 2004-02-12 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:011 2004-02-11 Red Hat RHSA-2004:030-01 2004-02-05 Fedora FEDORA-2004-068 2004-02-06 Red Hat RHSA-2004:031-01 2004-01-22 Debian DSA-426-1 2004-01-18

Comments (1 posted)

openssh: timing attack leads to information disclosure

Package(s):	openssh	CVE #(s):	CAN-2003-0190
Created:	May 2, 2003	Updated:	November 30, 2004
Description:	From the advisory: "During a pen-test we stumbled across a nasty bug in OpenSSH-portable with PAM support enabled (via the --with-pam configure script switch). This bug allows a remote attacker to identify valid users on vulnerable systems, through a simple timing attack. The vulnerability is easy to exploit and may have high severity, if combined with poor password policies and other security problems that allow local privilege escalation."
Alerts:	Ubuntu USN-34-1 2004-11-30 OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2003.035 2003-08-06 Red Hat RHSA-2003:222-01 2003-07-29 Gentoo 200305-02 2003-05-13 Gentoo 200305-01 2002-03-05

Comments (1 posted)

OpenSSL: denial of service vulnerabilities

Package(s):	OpenSSL	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0081 CAN-2003-0851
Created:	March 17, 2004	Updated:	November 2, 2005
Description:	Versions 0.9.7a-c of the OpenSSL library suffer from two denial of service vulnerabilities; see the version 0.9.7d release announcement for details.
Alerts:	Red Hat RHSA-2005:830-00 2005-11-02 Red Hat RHSA-2005:829-00 2005-11-02 Fedora FEDORA-2005-1042 2005-10-31 Fedora-Legacy FLSA:1395 2004-05-08 Conectiva CLA-2004:834 2004-03-31 Whitebox WBSA-2004:084-01 2004-03-23 Red Hat RHSA-2004:084-01 2004-03-23 Fedora FEDORA-2004-095 2004-03-19 Whitebox WBSA-2004:120-01 2004-03-22 Trustix TSLSA-2004-0012 2004-03-17 Slackware SSA:2004-077-01 2004-03-17 Red Hat RHSA-2004:121-01 2004-03-17 OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2004.007 2004-03-18 Gentoo 200403-03 2004-03-17 Debian DSA-465-1 2004-03-17 Netwosix NW-2004-0005 2004-03-17 Mandrake MDKSA-2004:023 2004-03-17 SuSE SuSE-SA:2004:007 2004-03-17 Red Hat RHSA-2004:120-01 2004-03-17 Red Hat RHSA-2004:119-01 2004-03-17 EnGarde ESA-20040317-003 2004-03-17

Comments (1 posted)

pavuk: buffer overflow

Package(s):	pavuk	CVE #(s):	CAN-2004-0456
Created:	June 30, 2004	Updated:	November 11, 2004
Description:	Versions of the pavuk web spider through 0.9.28-r1 contain a buffer overflow which could be exploited by a hostile server.
Alerts:	Gentoo