LWN.net Logo

LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 6, 2006

Interview: Jim Gettys (Part II)

The first part of our interview with Jim Gettys covered many aspects of the "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) system. With the second and final installment, we look at a number of other issues, including the software which will run on the system, security issues, and more.

LWN: Time for a few questions about the mix of software you envision running on the OLPC systems. To start with, it appears that the system will be based on a pared-down Fedora-based distribution?

To date, Red Hat are the ones who are putting serious engineering into OLPC and doing most the heavy lifting on the base system, and have assembled a first rate team, including Dave Woodhouse and Marcelo Tosatti.

Red Hat is putting together a pared-down Fedora derivative distribution. The community being what it is, I expect others will put other distributions on the machine as well, given that the OLPC system is an open platform. I'm not sure such duplication is worthwhile, but I'm resigned to it.

I *really* urge everyone to cooperate very strongly at the level of the software for the kids, no matter what the underlying distribution in the long term. This project is fundamentally about kids learning and helping the world; not about free software.

That being said, *free software enables the kids to learn computing in a way that they cannot learn it on closed proprietary platforms*. We are therefore very much part of the free and open source software community.

Chris' team is putting together a python based environment (into which conventional applications can be embedded) aimed at young children, temporarily called "sugar" (more information can be found in postings here, here, here, and here); conventional GUI's are not good for children still learning to read. I have a 8 year old son and an 11 year old daughter, and so have seen over the last few years first hand how unsuitable conventional desktops are for young children.

The Sugar environment, by using the Avahi library (zeroconf/mdns technology), will show the presence of people on the network as a fundamental aid to building collaborative applications. Collaboration is fundamental to learning: most kids learn from their peer group, and teachers serve as the guides.

Will the systems as shipped be 100% free software?

OLPC itself only plans to ship free software at this time.

If not, what other code do you think you might include?

Let me give a concrete example: some countries have coded some educational content in Flash.

We are strongly recommending that future content not be created in closed format like Flash, whose format is closed, lack tools for manipulation, and present major problems for accessibility tools.

But some countries have such content today, and need to use it immediately. And since there is so much flash content on the web, it would not surprise me if countries arrange for Flash to be installed, even if they do not have existing educational content in Flash. We are encouraging everyone to use open standards based formats, and to release useful content under appropriate free creative commons and free software licenses.

Reality being what it is, even if we had veto power over software on the machine (which we certainly don't), we'll see such software included on the machine by the time it in children and teacher's hands; just not distributed from OLPC, but added on afterwords.

Is it true that there will be no package manager on this system?

This is an area where we continue to have discussions. Whether it is like conventional packaging systems or not is unclear right now. Time will tell.

If so, will there be any provision for customizing the system software mix, installing localization data, or updating software?

Of course. There has to be. By middle school, kids are taking different courses and languages. Some kids have special needs, either advanced or the opposite. One of the major advantages that an OLPC has over conventional books, is the possibility to bring much more content appropriate for each child to that child, who live in places which lack libraries we find in U.S. and other developed nation's schools.

A system like this clearly needs a good set of education applications - an area where free software has not traditionally been strong. What sort of applications are you looking at in this area, and might any missing pieces come from?

There is much software sold claiming to be "educational" software, which isn't. The reality is that there aren't all that many good educational applications on *any* platform. The pickings are pretty slim.

We believe all children learn by doing, and should be authoring content, not only passively reading unchangeable engraved in stone content. We are placing some major bets on wiki technology as a base for this. (Not wiki markup though!).

I'd also like to draw your attention to a web site: logowiki.net. Content doesn't have to be static at all, and content can be programs, even programs for young children. The ability to run simulations and manipulate the starting conditions is a major tool to learning.

And one more hardware feature is unique to our machine: you can choose to use the audio input as a direct analog input, allowing direct measurements be made with very cheap sensors (e.g. photodiodes, accelerometers, etc.).

With the likes of Seymour Papert and Alan Kay involved, I think we're in for some fun stuff. For example I saw a demo this week of a wonderful music application called TamTam, that Jean Piche' et al in Canada and Ireland are building using the Csound synthesis software Barry Vercoe originally developed.

Will the systems include a compiler, or, failing that, an interpreter for a language like Python?

Of course.

At a minimum, we expect Logo, javascript and python to be present, and compilers as well when needed by interested kids. Learning programming, though, is best done in interpreted language environment, rather than compiled languages. Certainly C++ should never be a child's first computer language.

In general, is hacking one of the uses to which you think these machines will be put?

Hacking, in the original positive sense of the word (see the Jargon File), we certainly believe should be strongly encouraged in interested children: computing is a fundamental skill in today's society. For others, computers will just be a tool; their pen and paper.

Do you expect that the kids will have root access on their systems?

Yes: we want children to be able to learn computing, if they are interested. For the kid's systems, we want them "easy to fix", rather than "hard to break". For the school's servers, a shared resource, we want them to be "hard to break" *and* "easy to fix", and are exploring technologies like those developed by Planetlab.

Being root on your own personal machine is fundamentally different than having any access to information on the network you should not have. Project Athena, at MIT (where such technologies as Kerberos, X11, the first network IM system, among others), demonstrated this even 20 years ago: on those systems having root access does not get you access to anything but the services you had access to as an individual user. The root password on those systems has been posted for years: it just doesn't matter, if you do your homework properly.

The plan to use LinuxBIOS is interesting. Are there reasons driving that choice (beyond cost)?

Cost isn't a real factor in this decision. The royalty rate of a conventional BIOS is in fact very low.

Capability:

  • we'd like to be able to boot over the mesh network for (re)install
  • we may need to follow Mark Foster's fast suspend/resume path, in which case having full source may be essential to its success.
  • We want interested kids to be able to see how computers really work and learn accordingly.

Some years ago when I was working on Linux on the iPAQ, we had a 12 year old who was hacking on our boot loader, and learning tremendously as a result. Those outstanding kids should also have the opportunity to learn computing deeply.

Is LinuxBIOS ready for this sort of deployment?

We think so. It's already deployed commercially at pretty high scale on a number of products. And the very fast suspend/resume we may need to implement requires complete freedom of action at all levels of the machine.

Millions of identical systems, mostly lacking professional administration, would seem like a magnet for malware authors. What sort of thought is being put into preventing these systems from becoming worm carriers and large-scale zombie networks?

I doubt they will be exactly identical (other than hardware): language is but one of the obvious differences; children take different courses, and study different languages.

And if they need professional administration, we've failed.

Our view is that systems cannot require professional administration at a local level: we could not deploy quickly on this scale and have sufficient expertise if this were required. Part of the IPv6 argument is exactly to allow administration to scale and to simplify administration.

Eugene Kaspersky, who has been predicting Linux doom for years, is now saying that the OLPC will result in a new wave of malware from the developing world. Do you find this outcome plausible? Why or why not?

I don't find Mr. Kaspersky's arguments plausible, for a number of reasons.

We certainly are aware that security is a challenge: young children are not noted for choosing and keeping secure good passwords, and we are looking at other methods as a result.

We expect to deploy SELinux protecting the "standard" network services on our machines to help protect against day-0 attacks, to prevent bad guys from successfully attacking our systems and prevent such people from using our systems as a point of attack.

And keeping our systems up to date automatically is obviously essential.

As far as malware from the developing world: malware for what? Malware is very rare on Linux or Apple's OS/X systems: both systems break out of the starting gate much less insecure than Windows, and writing malware for either is inherently more difficult. And if Mr. Kaspersky's worried about kids in the developing world writing malware on the OLPC systems to attack Windows, how are the kids going to test such Windows malware since our machines are running Linux?

Malware authors working for profit (e.g. stealing passwords and accounts) are certainly going to be older than our kids, and will find a standard Windows system a much more productive development environment, and internet cafe's a much more anonymous place to launch attacks than our school environments.

Lastly, both at the school servers, and the networks supporting them, we have good places to prevent, stop, and track down any such attacks, much better than you'd find in the anonymous world of Internet Cafe's where anyone can pay for anonymous usage.

And high bandwidth back-haul from schools is unlikely to be very common, limiting the problem if it does occur. There are much better targets for zombies: e.g. systems all over the developed world where each machine has a high bandwidth broadband connection, rather than a kid's machine on a large shared mesh network back connected through a similar single connection. Per compromised machine, there may be a difference of a hundred to one of useful bandwidth.

Seems to me that Mr. Kaspersky knows not what he writes of, and is trying to gain eyeballs on his stories by sensationalism.

Given the state of the art, the chances of a security vulnerability turning up in the shipped OLPC systems must be near 100%. What happens then? How will OLPC users obtain and install security fixes?

Our challenge is not just the kid's machines and operating system, but also deployment of server machines in all the schools, to cache distribute software and educational content to all of them.

We expect the kids machines to be updated from school servers, and possibly from other kid's systems.

The closest management tools to what we need appears to be many of the technologies developed by PlanetLab: the commercial distributed content systems are unlikely to work, presuming as they do that systems are in data centers and always/usually available over high speed networks.

At our scale, (and with the highly variable Internet connections we expect), a presumption of constant connectivity seems untenable. We'll know more as we look into this aspect of the project more fully over the next few months.

Some commenters on LWN have expressed concerns that many of these systems may be stolen from the children and used for (or sold to fund) rather less wholesome ends. Is this an issue which the OLPC team has thought about?

Yes, we've thought about it quite a bit.

How could this risk be minimized?

First, we intend that the systems be instantly recognizable as kid's systems, not only so that kids like them and value them more and take care of them carefully, but also so that adults with machines in their possession may be asked questions about whether they should have the machine. And these systems are physically sized for smaller children, our primary "customers"; while adults can use them, it is less desirable than a bigger machine might be.

Second, public education about these distinctive systems is a topic we've discussed with deployment countries as a deterrent.

Third, by saturating each area during deployment, rather than distributing machines piecemeal, we can expect much better mesh networking performance, but also less child from child theft.

Fourth, there will be a commercial version of the machine (that will look quite different) at some point in the project, to reduce the pressure for these unique systems. As I explained before, there are quite a few ways in which these machines are unique, so we'd like there to be fewer reasons for theft, by enabling a commercial version. These commercial machines may also help cross subsidize the children's machine, for as long as the market might bear such a price differential.

Fifth, by its nature, there is a network MAC address in each machine that can aid its tracing, in the case of theft, once a system is recovered. We are, however, very concerned about the child's privacy and safety, and so don't want the systems to go around broadcasting the hardware MAC address in the normal case.

And we're exploring some other possible identity systems as well that may help in this area.

A huge "thank you" is due to Jim, who clearly took a great deal of time to respond to LWN's questions in such detail.

Comments (24 posted)

A software patent attack on Red Hat

Red Hat is long been a likely target of legal attacks; the company has a high profile, customers who can be threatened, and a bank balance which is worth the trouble of coveting. So it is not entirely surprising that a small company called FireStar chose Red Hat as the target for a software patent suit. It is unlikely to be the last.

The patent in question is US patent 6,101,502, which is said to be infringed by the "Hibernate" product acquired with JBoss. This patent, filed in 1998, asserts the following claim:

A method for interfacing an object oriented software application with a relational database, comprising the steps of:
  • selecting an object model;
  • generating a map of at least some relationships between schema in the database and the selected object model;
  • employing the map to create at least one interface object associated with an object corresponding to a class associated with the object oriented software application; and
  • utilizing a runtime engine which invokes said at least one interface object with the object oriented application to access data from the relational database.

In other words, this is a patent on an object-oriented wrapper for data in a relational database management system. To say that this idea is obvious is to understate the case. The first thing any object-oriented programmer does is to create classes to encapsulate the data to be manipulated; of course such a programmer would create a series of objects to represent relations in an RDBMS. One would expect that it would be possible to examine a large number of object-oriented programs which work with RDBMS systems and not find a single one which lacks this sort of impedance-matching layer. So the world did not need to wait until 1998 for the authors of this patent to come up with this idea.

Thus, if Red Hat puts up a suitable level of resistance, it should be able to get this patent invalidated. But there is little comfort to be found there. There are thousands of these patents in circulation and no shortage of trolls willing to exploit them to line their own pockets. One such case can be beaten down; but there will be more than one. Perhaps many more. Software patents have long been seen as a serious threat to free software; now we are beginning to see this threat come to life.

[As an aside, there have been some allegations that at least one Red Hat employee engaged in pro-patent lobbying in Europe last year, and that, as a result, this suit represents a sort of poetic justice. See this week's Letters Page for a discussion of both sides of this issue. The statement from FFII found there would appear to establish that Red Hat's position on software patents has been clear and consistent.]

Comments (2 posted)

SCO: the end gets closer

Your editor misses the Good Old Days, when outlandish SCO court filings were a daily occurrence, Darl McBride's fulminations were daily press fodder, and the occasional corporate teleconference could be counted upon to keep blood pressures high in the community. One could almost get nostalgic about plowing through yet another blurry PDF file filled with bizarre legalese. The world feels a little lonely now that Chris Sontag no longer shows his face in public.

Actually, the above paragraph is a bunch of hot air; LWN is more fun without the SCO Group on the front page. But a certain morbid interest suggests that the SCO end game should occasionally be chronicled as important milestones unfold. One of those milestones was passed on June 28, when Judge Wells issued an order in SCO v. IBM. For those of us who have been patiently (or, perhaps, not so patiently) waiting for SCO to feel the consequences of its lack of discretion in public and its lack of any actual evidence of wrongdoing, the time has finally come.

The SCO Group, remember, has been under court order for some time to disclose "with specificity" exactly what it thinks IBM did wrong. SCO's final answer took the form of 294 "specifics," described in a sealed filing. IBM responded with a motion saying that most of SCO's claims lacked the required level of specificity and should simply be thrown out, regardless of whether they might have any merit or not. Judge Wells's order was the court's response to this motion.

After reviewing (at length) SCO's history in the case, Judge Wells concluded that SCO's claims were, indeed, not specific enough. Not enough for the court, but also not up to the level that SCO expected from IBM. Thus:

Given SCO's track record in this case, the court is certain that if IBM had simply provided line information without version and file information for "methods," SCO would have filed motions to compel complaining about IBM's lack of specificity. The court cannot find any reason why SCO should not be held to the same level of accountability that SCO held IBM to. Thus, SCO should have supplied not only line but version and file information for whatever claims form the basis of SCO's case against IBM.

Failure to meet the specificity requirement is not enough to throw the claims out, however; a couple of other criteria must be met. One is that the failure was willful - that SCO deliberately failed to disclose that information. According to Judge Wells, that is, indeed, the case:

There is no evidence before the court to indicate that SCO lacked the ability to comply with the court's orders. In fact, given SCO's own public statements outlined in part supra, it would appear that SCO had more than enough evidence to comply with the court's orders....

Based on the foregoing, the court finds that SCO has had ample opportunity to articulate, identify and substantiate its claims against SCO. The court further finds that such failure was intentional and therefore willful based on SCO's disregard of the court's orders and failure to seek clarification. In the view of the court it is almost like SCO sought to hide its case until the ninth inning in hopes of gaining an unfair advantage despite being repeatedly told to put "all evidence . . . on the table."

One might well argue that this is a charitable view of SCO's behavior. But it makes one thing clear: the court has noticed the discrepancy between SCO's public bluster and the evidence it has actually put forward in the trial.

Finally, IBM had to show that it was being hurt by SCO's failure. The court had no trouble buying IBM's argument that it would be hard put to defend a case where it is unaware of what it has done wrong. The troubles go beyond that, though:

Without more specificity than SCO has provided some very important questions that could materially impact this case are nearly impossible to answer. For example, is the code that comprised the method or concept still in use in Linux? If not, then damages may become nominal instead of in the billions. Or, it may be possible that the code comprising a method or concept was already disclosed pursuant to some other license such as the BSD License.... Without the code, however, there is no way to ascertain exactly what the impact is of prior disclosures that may involve the code at issue in the instant case.

The end result is that IBM won big: 182 of SCO's claims have been summarily tossed out - just ten short of what IBM had asked for. On the order of 100 claims remain. This ruling is clearly a major blow to SCO's case, but just how major is hard to say: since SCO's claims remain under seal, we cannot know which ones have survived. But it is clearly a much shorter list, with much of the "methods and concepts" vapor removed. And, just as importantly, the court appears to have concluded that SCO has been given plenty of rope at this point; with luck, this whole episode might just reach a conclusion sometime soon.

Comments (4 posted)

Page editor: Jonathan Corbet

Security

Prelink and address space randomization

July 5, 2006

This article was contributed by John Richard Moser

Prelink (PDF) is a popular tool used to decrease program load time, shortening system boot time and making applications start faster. Developed by Jakob Jelinek at Red Hat, prelink relocates libraries on disk to save dynamic linking time.

When the dynamic linker loads a dynamically linked ELF binary, it has to also load and link all of the libraries before executing the program's entry point, _main(). This process involves relocating libraries—changing all addresses referenced in the library to reflect the actual addresses in memory. Relocating libraries involves iterating through each address in the library and replacing it with the real address as determined by the library's location in the process's virtual address space. Most relocations happen in the symbol table and PLT; but in rare cases there are also .text relocations which require fixed-position executable code to be patched in a slightly slower process.

The relocation process will slow down an application's launch. In order to speed up the process, prelink relocates the libraries ahead of time. This is done by scanning every executable to be prelinked, generating a graph of libraries that will be loaded at the same time as other libraries, and then calculating target addresses for each library at such that it will never be loaded at the same address as other libraries. These offsets are then stored in the shared object files themselves, and the symbol tables and segment addresses are all adjusted to reflect addresses based on the chosen base address.

Once prelink has done its job, the dynamic linker no longer has to concern itself with relocation. Libraries are loaded at the address specified in the library header and the symbol table is already correct. If anything forces the library to be loaded at a different address, then the library is relocated appropriately as usual; otherwise we can say goodbye to the load-time overhead of relocating libraries.

Kernel facilities supplying address space layout randomization for libraries cannot be used in conjunction with prelink; to do so would require relocating the libraries, defeating the purpose of prelinking. Address space randomization is a core feature of secure systems such as OpenBSD, Adamantix, Hardened Gentoo, Fedora Core, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It has appeared as part of PaX as well as part of Ingo Molnar's Exec Shield, and has been accepted into the mainline kernel as of 2.6.12 after submission by Arjan van de Ven.

The simple purpose of address space randomization is to make it more difficult to perform certain classes of attacks by changing where in memory important segments for the attack are loaded. If an attacker wants to execute injected shell code or manipulate the program to execute out of order, he obviously has to know where that code is. By shuffling memory segments around, these attacks become quite difficult; the chances of successful attack are mathematically described in the PaX documentation and Wikipedia.

In an attempt to restore some of the benefits of address space randomization, prelink is capable of randomly selecting the addresses used for prelinking. This makes it more difficult to perform certain attacks on a system, because the addresses used are unique to that system. This approach is, however, less effective than per-process randomization because the addresses stay constant until prelink is run again.

There is another implication that has to be examined with prelink. To understand this implication, let us first review a feature of prelink by examining the load address of the C standard library in two processes: a user-owned 'cat' and a root-owned 'bash'. The C standard library is interesting because, in practice, virtually all return-to-libc attacks utilize it exclusively.

 user@icebox:~$ cat /proc/self/maps | grep libc | grep r-xp
 4df2e000-4e053000 r-xp 00000000 08:07 81197      /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.3.6.so
 user@icebox:~$ sudo -s
 root@icebox:/home/user# cat /proc/$$/maps | grep libc | grep r-xp
 4df2e000-4e053000 r-xp 00000000 08:07 81197      /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.3.6.so

Closely examining these quickly verifies that the address of glibc's executable code is the same between these two processes; this is consistent with the behavior of prelink. Because the library itself is relocated ahead of time, there is a preference for the dynamic linker to load it at that address. Examination of libc itself yields the below.

 user@icebox:~$ readelf -S /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.3.6.so | head -n 6
 There are 64 section headers, starting at offset 0x12d114:
 
 Section Headers:
   [Nr] Name              Type            Addr     Off    Size   ES Flg Lk Inf Al
   [ 0]                   NULL            00000000 000000 000000 00      0   0  0
   [ 1] .note.ABI-tag     NOTE            4df2e154 000154 000020 00   A  0   0  4

Computing 4df2e154 - 154, the address and offset taken from any given non-NULL segment, yields 4df2e000, the base address of libc. This makes sense; prelink rewrites the segment and symbol addresses for the library based on a specific load address, and the dynamic linker loads the library at that address to avoid relocating it. Further, any program that links with libc has to be able to read libc, and will thus be able to derive the same information.

All of this means that any program on the system using any prelinked library will be able to leak information about higher privileged tasks using the same library. This allows any attacker able to gain any form of local access—or more directly any ability to read libc—to gain information about the address space layout of higher privileged processes, including the load address of libc. As we know, this information is extremely valuable to an attacker wanting to exploit a privileged process without brute forcing library load addresses.

This vulnerability only applies to attackers with local access; but this is not an unreasonable requirement. Many web hosting companies give local shell access or allow PHP; either of these can be used to remotely fetch a copy of libc. Due to the nature of the dynamic linker and sane security design, the dynamic linker is exactly as privileged as the process it is starting; therefor, even the most stringent mandatory access policies on systems such as SELinux, grsecurity, or AppArmor cannot prevent this attack.

Besides avoiding prelinking, there is one other way to prevent this information leak from being exploited. All processes linked to a prelinked library need access to the library file and load that library at the same address; the point of exposure is the use of the same copy of the library. In order to prevent information leaking, then, you must have separate copy of each library common between any two programs you don't want to leak information about each other. This can be done with Xen, chroot jails, UML, or simply isolated machines, as long as the directory hierarchies are individually prelinked with prelink randomization. Each system will have a different set of addresses from every other system in this scheme. This of course requires more hardware, more disk space, more management, more memory, and more work.

The direct implications of this information leak depend on your exact security concerns. A web hosting company, for example, may not want to run prelink on its servers, given the risk of effectively losing the benefit of address space randomization. A home desktop, on the other hand, may only have to worry about a trojan using the information leak to stage an attack on a system service such as cups or dbus—and should probably worry about /proc/PID/maps first. While these are both essentially the concern of an attacker with local access, the likelihood of attack and the value of potential damages are different.

The prelink tool gives a useful decrease in program load time, and can help users reach their desktop and the programs they need to run more quickly. It does however have some unfortunate repercussions that must be examined, especially in security-sensitive environments relying on address space randomization.

Comments (16 posted)

New vulnerabilities

acroread: unspecified security problems

Package(s):acroread CVE #(s):CVE-2006-3093
Created:July 4, 2006 Updated:July 5, 2006
Description: Various unspecified security problems have been fixed in Acrobat Reader version 7.0.8. Adobe does not provide detailed information about the nature of the security problems. Therefore, it is necessary to assume that remote code execution is possible.
Alerts:
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:041 2006-07-04

Comments (1 posted)

kernel: denial of service

Package(s):kernel CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2934
Created:July 5, 2006 Updated:July 7, 2006
Description: The netfilter SCTP connection tracking code can crash when faced with a "packet without chunks." This vulnerability was fixed in the 2.6.17.3 kernel release.
Alerts:
Trustix TSLSA-2006-0040 2006-07-07
Fedora FEDORA-2006-772 2006-07-05
Fedora FEDORA-2006-769 2006-07-05

Comments (none posted)

kiax: arbitrary code execution

Package(s):kiax CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2923
Created:June 30, 2006 Updated:July 5, 2006
Description: The iax_net_read function in the iaxclient library fails to properly handle IAX2 packets with truncated full frames or mini-frames. These frames are detected in a length check but processed anyway, leading to buffer overflows.
Alerts:
Gentoo 200606-30 2006-06-30

Comments (none posted)

openoffice.org: several vulnerabilities

Package(s):openoffice.org CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2198 CVE-2006-2199 CVE-2006-3117
Created:June 30, 2006 Updated:January 4, 2007
Description: Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in OpenOffice.org, a free office suite.
  • It turned out to be possible to embed arbitrary BASIC macros in documents in a way that OpenOffice.org does not see them but executes them anyway without any user interaction. (CVE-2006-2198)
  • It is possible to evade the Java sandbox with specially crafted Java applets. (CVE-2006-2199)
  • Loading malformed XML documents can cause buffer overflows and cause a denial of service or execute arbitrary code. (CVE-2006-3117)
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2007-005 2007-01-03
rPath rPSA-2006-0173-1 2006-09-26
Gentoo 200607-12 2006-07-28
Ubuntu USN-313-2 2006-07-19
Ubuntu USN-313-1 2006-07-11
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:118 2006-07-07
Debian DSA-1104-2 2006-07-06
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0573-01 2006-07-03
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:040 2006-07-03
Fedora FEDORA-2006-770 2006-07-03
Fedora FEDORA-2006-764 2006-06-30
Debian DSA-1104-1 2006-06-30

Comments (none posted)

opera: integer overflow and SSL spoof

Package(s):opera CVE #(s):CVE-2006-3198 CVE-2006-3331
Created:July 3, 2006 Updated:July 5, 2006
Description: Opera before version 9.0 has an integer overflow vulnerability due to the improper handling of JPEG files. Also Opera did not reset the SSL security bar after displaying a download dialog from an SSL-enabled website, which could allow remote attackers to spoof a trusted SSL certificate from an untrusted website and facilitate phishing attacks.
Alerts:
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:038 2006-07-03

Comments (none posted)

tikiwiki: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):tikiwiki CVE #(s):CVE-2006-3048 CVE-2006-3047
Created:June 29, 2006 Updated:July 5, 2006
Description: The Tikiwiki content management system has an SQL injection vulnerability due to insufficient input sanitization. An attacker may be able to execute arbitrary SQL statements or inject arbitrary scripts into the user's browser.
Alerts:
Gentoo 200606-29 2006-06-29

Comments (none posted)

Updated vulnerabilities

asterisk: buffer overflow

Package(s):asterisk CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2898
Created:June 15, 2006 Updated:July 27, 2006
Description: The Asterisk PBX application has a buffer overflow vulnerability in the IAX2 channel driver that can be used for the remote execution of arbitrary code.
Alerts:
Debian DSA-1126-1 2006-07-27
Gentoo 200606-15 2006-06-14

Comments (none posted)

binutils: buffer overflow

Package(s):binutils CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2362
Created:May 27, 2006 Updated:August 29, 2006
Description: The GNU Binutils has a buffer overflow vulnerability in libbfd. Maliciously crafted Tektronix Hex Format files with improper length characters can cause a crash and possibly lead to the execution of arbitrary code.
Alerts:
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:153 2006-08-28
Ubuntu USN-292-1 2006-06-09
OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2006.009 2006-05-26

Comments (none posted)

busybox: insecure password generation

Package(s):busybox CVE #(s):CVE-2006-1058
Created:May 5, 2006 Updated:May 2, 2007
Description: The BusyBox 1.1.1 passwd command does not use a proper salt when generating passwords. This would create an instance where a brute force attack could take very little time.
Alerts:
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0244-02 2007-05-01
Fedora FEDORA-2006-511 2006-05-04
Fedora FEDORA-2006-510 2006-05-04

Comments (2 posted)

bzip2: race condition and infinite loop

Package(s):bzip2 CVE #(s):CAN-2005-0953 CAN-2005-1260
Created:May 17, 2005 Updated:January 10, 2007
Description: A race condition in bzip2 1.0.2 and earlier allows local users to modify permissions of arbitrary files via a hard link attack on a file while it is being decompressed, whose permissions are changed by bzip2 after the decompression is complete. Also specially crafted bzip2 archives may cause an infinite loop in the decompressor.
Alerts:
rPath rPSA-2007-0004-1 2007-01-09
Debian DSA-741-1 2005-07-07
Red Hat RHSA-2005:474-01 2005-06-16
OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2005.008 2005-06-10
SuSE SUSE-SR:2005:015 2005-06-07
Debian DSA-730-1 2005-05-27
Mandriva MDKSA-2005:091 2005-05-18
Ubuntu USN-127-1 2005-05-17

Comments (2 posted)

ktools: buffer overflow

Package(s):centericq CVE #(s):CVE-2005-3863
Created:December 7, 2005 Updated:August 29, 2006
Description: From the Debian-Testing alert: Mehdi Oudad "deepfear" and Kevin Fernandez "Siegfried" from the Zone-H Research Team discovered a buffer overflow in kkstrtext.h of the ktools library, which is included in (at least) centericq and motor.
Alerts:
Gentoo 200608-27 2006-08-29
Debian DSA-1088-1 2006-06-03
Debian DSA-1083-1 2006-05-31
Gentoo 200512-11 2005-12-20
Debian-Testing DTSA-23-1 2005-12-05

Comments (none posted)

courier: denial of service

Package(s):courier CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2659
Created:June 9, 2006 Updated:August 4, 2006
Description: A denial of service vulnerability has been found in the function for encoding email addresses. Addresses containing a '=' before the '@' character caused the Courier to hang in an endless loop, rendering the service unusable.
Alerts:
Gentoo 200608-06 2006-08-04
Debian DSA-1101-1 2006-06-23
Ubuntu USN-294-1 2006-06-09

Comments (none posted)

cpio: arbitrary code execution

Package(s):cpio CVE #(s):CVE-2005-4268
Created:January 2, 2006 Updated:May 8, 2007
Description: Richard Harms discovered that cpio did not sufficiently validate file properties when creating archives. Files with e. g. a very large size caused a buffer overflow. By tricking a user or an automatic backup system into putting a specially crafted file into a cpio archive, a local attacker could probably exploit this to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the target user (which is likely root in an automatic backup system).
Alerts:
rPath rPSA-2007-0094-1 2007-05-07
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0245-02 2007-05-01
Ubuntu USN-234-1 2006-01-02

Comments (none posted)

vixie-cron: privilege escalation

Package(s):cron CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2607
Created:May 31, 2006 Updated:July 13, 2006
Description: The Vixie cron daemon does not check the return code from setuid(); if that call can be made to fail, a local attacker may be able to execute commands as root.
Alerts:
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0539-01 2006-07-12
Gentoo 200606-07 2006-06-09
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:027 2006-05-31
rPath rPSA-2006-0082-1 2006-05-25

Comments (1 posted)

Cyrus-SASL: DIGEST-MD5 Pre-Authentication Denial of Service

Package(s):cyrus-sasl CVE #(s):CVE-2006-1721
Created:April 21, 2006 Updated:September 4, 2007
Description: Cyrus-SASL contains an unspecified vulnerability in the DIGEST-MD5 process that could lead to a Denial of Service. An attacker could possibly exploit this vulnerability by sending specially crafted data stream to the Cyrus-SASL server, resulting in a Denial of Service even if the attacker is not able to authenticate.
Alerts:
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0878-01 2007-09-04
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0795-01 2007-09-04
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:025 2006-05-05
Fedora FEDORA-2006-515 2006-05-04
Debian DSA-1042-1 2006-04-25
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:073 2006-04-24
Ubuntu USN-272-1 2006-04-24
Gentoo 200604-09 2006-04-21

Comments (none posted)

EnergyMech: denial of service

Package(s):emech CVE #(s):
Created:June 27, 2006 Updated:June 28, 2006
Description: A bug in EnergyMech fails to handle empty CTCP NOTICEs correctly, and will cause a crash from a segmentation fault. By sending an empty CTCP NOTICE, a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause a denial of service.
Alerts:
Gentoo 200606-26 2006-06-26

Comments (none posted)

freetype: integer overflows

Package(s):freetype CVE #(s):CVE-2006-0747 CVE-2006-1861 CVE-2006-2493 CVE-2006-2661 CVE-2006-3467
Created:June 8, 2006 Updated:October 10, 2007
Description: The FreeType library has several integer overflow vulnerabilities. If a user can be tricked into installing a specially crafted font file, arbitrary code can be executed with the privilege of the user.
Alerts:
Gentoo 200710-09 2007-10-09
Debian DSA-1178-1 2006-09-16
Ubuntu USN-341-1 2006-09-06
Gentoo 200609-04 2006-09-06
rPath rPSA-2006-0157-1 2006-08-25
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:148 2006-08-24
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0635-01 2006-08-21
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0634-01 2006-08-21
Fedora FEDORA-2006-912 2006-08-14
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:045 2006-08-01
OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2006.017 2006-07-28
Ubuntu USN-324-1 2006-07-27
Slackware SSA:2006-207-02 2006-07-27
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:129 2006-07-20
Gentoo 200607-02 2006-07-09
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:037 2006-06-27
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:099-1 2006-06-13
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:099 2006-06-12
rPath rPSA-2006-0100-1 2006-06-12
Debian DSA-1095-1 2006-06-10
Ubuntu USN-291-1 2006-06-08

Comments (none posted)

gdb: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):gdb CVE #(s):CAN-2005-1704 CAN-2005-1705
Created:May 20, 2005 Updated:August 11, 2006
Description: Tavis Ormandy of the Gentoo Linux Security Audit Team discovered an integer overflow in the BFD library, resulting in a heap overflow. A review also showed that by default, gdb insecurely sources initialization files from the working directory. Successful exploitation would result in the execution of arbitrary code on loading a specially crafted object file or the execution of arbitrary commands.
Alerts:
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0354-01 2006-08-10
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0368-01 2006-07-20
Mandriva MDKSA-2005:215 2005-11-23
Fedora FEDORA-2005-1033 2005-10-27
Fedora FEDORA-2005-1032 2005-10-27
Red Hat RHSA-2005:801-01 2005-10-18
Red Hat RHSA-2005:763-01 2005-10-11
Red Hat RHSA-2005:709-01 2005-10-05
Red Hat RHSA-2005:673-01 2005-10-05
Red Hat RHSA-2005:659-01 2005-09-28
Fedora FEDORA-2005-498 2005-06-29
Fedora FEDORA-2005-497 2005-06-29
Gentoo 200506-01 2005-06-01
Trustix TSLSA-2005-0025 2005-05-31
Mandriva MDKSA-2005:095 2005-05-30
Ubuntu USN-136-2 2005-05-27
Ubuntu USN-136-1 2005-05-27
Ubuntu USN-135-1 2005-05-27
Gentoo 200505-15 2005-05-20

Comments (5 posted)

gdm: improper file permissions

Package(s):gdm CVE #(s):CVE-2006-1057
Created:April 19, 2006 Updated:May 2, 2007
Description: The .ICEauthority file may be created with the wrong ownership and permissions; gdm 2.14.2 fixes the problem.
Alerts:
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0286-02 2007-05-01
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:083 2006-05-09
Ubuntu USN-278-1 2006-05-03
Debian DSA-1040-1 2006-04-24
Fedora FEDORA-2006-338 2006-04-19

Comments (none posted)

gnupg: remote denial of service

Package(s):gnupg CVE #(s):CVE-2006-3082
Created:June 21, 2006 Updated:July 28, 2006
Description: A vulnerability was discovered in GnuPG 1.4.3 and 1.9.20 (and earlier) that could allow a remote attacker to cause gpg to crash and possibly overwrite memory via a message packet with a large length.
Alerts:
SuSE SUSE-SR:2006:018 2006-07-28
Debian DSA-1115-1 2006-07-21
Debian DSA-1107-1 2006-07-10
Fedora FEDORA-2006-757 2006-06-30
Fedora FEDORA-2006-755 2006-06-30
SuSE SUSE-SR:2006:015 2006-06-30
rPath rPSA-2006-0120-1 2006-06-29
Slackware SSA:2006-178-02 2006-06-28
Ubuntu USN-304-1 2006-06-26
OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2006.010 2006-06-26
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:110 2006-06-20

Comments (1 posted)

gzip: arbitrary command execution

Package(s):gzip CVE #(s):CAN-2005-0758
Created:August 1, 2005 Updated:January 9, 2007
Description: zgrep in gzip before 1.3.5 does not handle shell metacharacters like '|' and '&' properly when they occurred in input file names. This could be exploited to execute arbitrary commands with user privileges if zgrep is run in an untrusted directory with specially crafted file names.
Alerts:
OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2007.002 2007-01-08
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:027 2006-01-30
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:026 2006-01-30
Fedora-Legacy FLSA:158801 2005-11-14
Fedora-Legacy FLSA:157696 2005-08-10
Ubuntu USN-161-1 2005-08-04
Ubuntu USN-158-1 2005-08-01

Comments (2 posted)

Hashcash: possible heap overflow

Package(s):hashcash CVE #(s):CVE-2006-3251
Created:June 27, 2006 Updated:July 21, 2006
Description: Andreas Seltenreich has reported a possible heap overflow in the array_push() function in hashcash.c, as a result of an incorrect amount of allocated memory for the "ARRAY" structure.
Alerts:
Debian DSA-1114-1 2006-07-21
Gentoo 200606-25 2006-06-26

Comments (none posted)

horde: missing input sanitizing

Package(s):horde CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2195
Created:June 15, 2006 Updated:June 29, 2006
Description: The Horde3 web application framework does not perform sufficient input sanitizing, allowing the possible injection of web script code through a cross-site scripting attack.
Alerts:
Gentoo 200606-28 2006-06-29
Debian DSA-1099-1 2006-06-14
Debian DSA-1098-1 2006-06-14

Comments (none posted)

ImageMagick: heap overflow vulnerability

Package(s):ImageMagick CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2440
Created:May 25, 2006 Updated:September 5, 2006
Description: The ImageMagick DisplayImageCommand has a heap overflow vulnerability. If an maliciously created unexpanded glob is passed to ImageMagick, a heap overflow can result.
Alerts:
Debian DSA-1168-1 2006-09-04
Fedora FEDORA-2006-588 2006-05-24
Fedora FEDORA-2006-587 2006-05-24

Comments (none posted)

kdebase: local root vulnerability

Package(s):kdebase CVE #(s):CAN-2005-2494
Created:September 7, 2005 Updated:August 11, 2006
Description: The kdebase package (and kcheckpass in particular) found in KDE versions 3.2.0 through 3.4.2 suffers from a lock file handling error which can enable a local attacker to obtain root access. See this advisory for details.
Alerts:
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0582-01 2006-08-10
Debian DSA-815-1 2005-09-16
Slackware SSA:2005-251-01 2005-09-09
Ubuntu USN-176-1 2005-09-07
Mandriva MDKSA-2005:160 2005-09-06

Comments (none posted)

kdebase: privilege escalation

Package(s):kdebase CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2449
Created:June 15, 2006 Updated:August 28, 2006
Description: The KDE Display Manager(KDM) is vulnerable to a local symlink attack. A local user can use this to read arbitrary files that they do not have permission to access. See this KDE advisory for more information.
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2006-942 2006-08-28
Debian DSA-1156-1 2006-08-27
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0576-01 2006-07-25
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:039 2006-07-03
Slackware SSA:2006-178-01 2006-06-28
Gentoo 200606-23 2006-06-22
Fedora FEDORA-2006-726 2006-06-19
Fedora FEDORA-2006-725 2006-06-19
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:106 2006-06-15
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:105 2006-06-15
rPath rPSA-2006-0106-1 2006-06-15
Ubuntu USN-301-1 2006-06-14
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0548-01 2006-06-14

Comments (none posted)

kdelibs: kate backup file permission leak

Package(s):kdelibs kate kwrite CVE #(s):CAN-2005-1920
Created:July 19, 2005 Updated:November 27, 2006
Description: Kate / Kwrite, as shipped with KDE 3.2.x up to including 3.4.0, creates a file backup before saving a modified file. These backup files are created with default permissions, even if the original file had more strict permissions set. See this advisory for more information.
Alerts:
Gentoo 200611-21 2006-11-27
Debian DSA-804-2 2005-11-10
Debian DSA-804-1 2005-09-08
Red Hat RHSA-2005:612-01 2005-07-27
Ubuntu USN-150-1 2005-07-21
Mandriva MDKSA-2005:122 2005-07-20
Fedora FEDORA-2005-594 2005-07-19

Comments (none posted)

kernel: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):kernel CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2271 CVE-2006-2272 CVE-2006-2274 CVE-2006-2275 CVE-2006-1864
Created:May 12, 2006 Updated:July 13, 2006
Description: Multiple vulnerabilities in the Linux have been found.
  • An error in the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) code that uses incorrect state table entries when certain ECNE chunks are received in CLOSED state, could be exploited by attackers to cause a kernel panic via a specially crafted packet.
  • An error exist when handling incoming IP-fragmented SCTP control chunks, which could be exploited by attackers to cause a kernel panic via a specially crafted packet.
  • Linux SCTP (lksctp) allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite recursion and crash) via a packet that contains two or more DATA fragments, which causes an skb pointer to refer back to itself when the full message is reassembled, leading to infinite recursion in the sctp_skb_pull function
  • Linux SCTP (lksctp) allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (deadlock) via a large number of small messages to a receiver application that cannot process the messages quickly enough, which leads to "spillover of the receive buffer."
  • A vulnerability has been identified due to an input validation error when processing arguments containing backslash ("\\") characters passed to certain commands (e.g. "cd"), which could be exploited by authenticated attackers to escape chroot restrictions for a CIFS or SMBFS mounted filesystem.
Alerts:
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0580-01 2006-07-13
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0579-01 2006-07-13
Debian DSA-1103-1 2006-06-27
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:028 2006-05-31
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0493-01 2006-05-24
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:086 2006-05-18
Trustix TSLSA-2006-0026 2006-05-12

Comments (none posted)

kernel: netfilter memory corruption

Package(s):kernel CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2444
Created:May 25, 2006 Updated:July 5, 2006
Description: The 2.6.12 kernel has a remote memory corruption vulnerability that can be remotely triggered by loading the ip_nat_snmp_basic module and traffic is network-translated on port 161 or 162.
Alerts:
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:116 2006-07-05
Ubuntu USN-302-1 2006-06-15
Trustix TSLSA-2006-0030 2006-05-26
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:087 2006-05-24

Comments (none posted)

kernel: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):kernel CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2445 CVE-2006-2448 CVE-2006-3085
Created:June 23, 2006 Updated:August 11, 2006
Description: There is a race condition error in the "posix-cpu-timers.c" script that does not prevent another CPU from attaching the timer to an exiting process. This could be exploited by attackers to cause a denial of service.

A flaw due to errors in "powerpc/kernel/signal_32.c" and "powerpc/kernel/signal_32.c" could allow userspace to provoke a machine check on 32-bit kernels.

An infinite loop in "netfilter/xt_sctp.c" could be exploited by attackers to exhaust all available memory resources, creating a denial of service condition.

Alerts:
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:047 2006-08-11
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0575-01 2006-08-10
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:123 2006-07-13
rPath rPSA-2006-0110-1 2006-06-23
Trustix TSLSA-2006-0037 2006-06-23

Comments (none posted)

kernel: information disclosure

Package(s):kernel CVE #(s):CVE-2006-1343
Created:May 31, 2006 Updated:July 20, 2006
Description: The 2.6 kernel netfilter code contains an information leak; this vulnerability has been fixed in the 2.6.16.19 release.
Alerts:
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0437-01 2006-07-20
Debian DSA-1097-1 2006-06-14
Fedora FEDORA-2006-698 2006-06-11
Fedora FEDORA-2006-697 2006-06-11
Trustix TSLSA-2006-0032 2006-06-05
rPath rPSA-2006-0087-1 2006-05-31

Comments (none posted)

libgadu: memory alignment bug

Package(s):libgadu CVE #(s):CAN-2005-2370
Created:July 29, 2005 Updated:June 25, 2007
Description: Szymon Zygmunt and Michal Bartoszkiewicz discovered a memory alignment error in libgadu (from ekg, console Gadu Gadu client, an instant messaging program) which is included in gaim, a multi-protocol instant messaging client, as well. This can not be exploited on the x86 architecture but on others, e.g. on Sparc and lead to a bus error, in other words a denial of service.
Alerts:
Debian DSA-813-1 2005-09-15
Red Hat RHSA-2005:627-01 2005-08-09
Debian DSA-769-1 2005-07-29

Comments (none posted)

libgd2: denial of service

Package(s):libgd2 CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2906
Created:June 14, 2006 Updated:January 16, 2007
Description: Certain GIF images can cause libgd2 to go into an infinite loop, adversely affecting the performance of image processing applications.
Alerts:
rPath rPSA-2007-0008-1 2007-01-15
Debian DSA-1117-1 2006-07-21
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:113 2006-06-27
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:112 2006-06-27
Ubuntu USN-298-1 2006-06-13

Comments (none posted)

libmms: buffer overflows

Package(s):libmms CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2200
Created:July 6, 2006 Updated:December 25, 2006
Description: Several buffer overflows were found in libmms. By tricking a user into opening a specially crafted remote multimedia stream with an application using libmms, a remote attacker could overwrite an arbitrary memory portion with zeros, thereby crashing the program.
Alerts:
Slackware SSA:2006-357-05 2006-12-25
Gentoo 200607-07 2006-07-20
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:121 2006-07-12
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:117-1 2006-07-12
Ubuntu USN-315-1 2006-07-12
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:117 2006-07-06
Ubuntu USN-309-1 2006-07-05

Comments (none posted)

libpam-ldap: authentication bypass

Package(s):libpam-ldap CVE #(s):CAN-2005-2641
Created:August 25, 2005 Updated:October 6, 2006
Description: libpam-ldap, the PAM LDAP interface, has a vulnerability in which it fails to authenticate with an LDAP server which is not configured properly, allowing an authentication bypass.
Alerts:
rPath rPSA-2006-0183-1 2006-10-05
Mandriva MDKSA-2005:190 2005-10-20
Gentoo 200508-22 2005-08-31
Debian DSA-785-1 2005-08-25

Comments (none posted)

libtiff: buffer overflow

Package(s):libtiff CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2193
Created:June 15, 2006 Updated:September 1, 2008
Description: The t2p_write_pdf_string function in libtiff 3.8.2 and earlier is vulnerable to a buffer overflow. Attackers can use a TIFF file with UTF-8 characters in the DocumentName tag to overflow a buffer, causing a denial of service, and possibly the execution of arbitrary code.
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2006-952 2006-09-05
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:044 2006-08-01
Gentoo 200607-03 2006-07-09
SuSE SUSE-SR:2006:014 2006-06-20
Trustix TSLSA-2006-0036 2006-06-16
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:102 2006-06-14
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0848-01 2008-08-28
CentOS CESA-2008:0848 2008-08-30

Comments (none posted)

mozilla products have multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):mozilla seamonkey firefox thunderbird CVE #(s):CVE-2006-2775 CVE-2006-2776 CVE-2006-2777 CVE-2006-2778 CVE-2006-2779 CVE-2006-2780 CVE-2006-2782 CVE-2006-2783 CVE-2006-2784 CVE-2006-2785 CVE-2006-2786 CVE-2006-2787
Created:June 5, 2006 Updated:August 2, 2006
Description: There are multiple vulnerabilities in products based on Mozilla components, particularly Gecko. This CERT advisory contains details.
Alerts:
Debian DSA-1134-1 2006-08-02
Ubuntu USN-297-3 2006-07-26
Ubuntu USN-323-1 2006-07-25
Ubuntu USN-296-2 2006-07-25
Debian DSA-1120-1 2006-07-23
Debian DSA-1118-1 2006-07-22
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0578-01 2006-07-20
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:035 2006-06-23
Gentoo 200606-21 2006-06-19
Fedora FEDORA-2006-717 2006-06-15
Fedora FEDORA-2006-715 2006-06-15
Ubuntu USN-297-2 2006-06-15
Ubuntu USN-297-1 2006-06-13
Gentoo 200606-12 2006-06-11
Slackware SSA:2006-155-02 2006-06-05
rPath rPSA-2006-0091-1 2006-06-02

Comments (none posted)

mpg123: buffer overflows

Package(s):mpg123 CVE #(s):CVE-2006-1655
Created:May 24, 2006 Updated:July 3, 2006
Description: mpg123 does not properly validate MPEG 2.0 layer 3 files, leading to a number of buffer overflow vulnerabilities.
Alerts:
Gentoo 200607-01 2006-07-03
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:092 2006-05-26
Debian DSA-1074-1 2006-05-24

Comments (none posted)

mutt: IMAP namespace buffer overflow

Package(s):mutt CVE #(s):CVE-2006-3242
Created:June 28, 2006 Updated:October 24, 2006
Description: TAKAHASHI Tamotsu discovered that mutt's IMAP backend did not sufficiently check the validity of namespace strings. If an user connects to a malicious IMAP server, that server could exploit this to crash mutt or even execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the mutt user. See this Secunia advisory for more information.
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2006-1061 2006-10-24
Slackware SSA:2006-207-01 2006-07-27
OpenPKG OpenPKG-SA-2006.013 2006-07-15
SuSE SUSE-SR:2006:016 2006-07-14
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0577-01 2006-07-12
Debian DSA-1108-1 2006-07-11
Fedora FEDORA-2006-761 2006-06-29
Fedora FEDORA-2006-760 2006-06-29
Trustix TSLSA-2006-0038 2006-06-30
rPath rPSA-2006-0116-1 2006-06-29
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:115 2006-06-28
Gentoo 200606-27 2006-06-28
Ubuntu USN-307-1 2006-06-28

Comments (none posted)

mysql: denial of service

Package(s):mysql CVE #(s):CVE-2006-3081
Created:June 23, 2006 Updated:July 18, 2006
Description: Mysqld in MySQL 4.1.x before 4.1.18, 5.0.x before 5.0.19, and 5.1.x before 5.1.6 allows remote authorized users to cause a denial of service (crash) via a NULL second argument to the str_to_date function.
Alerts:
Debian DSA-1112-1 2006-07-18
Ubuntu USN-306-1 2006-06-27
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:111 2006-06-23

Comments (none posted)

MySQL: logging bypass

Package(s):mysql CVE #(s):CVE-2006-0903
Created:April 4, 2006 Updated:May 21, 2008
Description: MySQL 5.0.18 and earlier allows local users to bypass logging mechanisms via SQL queries that contain the NULL character, which are not properly handled by the mysql_real_query function. NOTE: this issue was originally reported for the mysql_query function, but the vendor states that since mysql_query expects a null character, this is not an issue for mysql_query.
Alerts:
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0364-01 2008-05-21
Ubuntu USN-274-2 2006-05-15
Ubuntu USN-274-1 2006-04-27
Mandriva MDKSA-2006:064 2006-04-03

Comments (2 posted)

ntp: uses wrong gid

Package(s):ntp CVE #(s):CAN-2005-2496
Created:August 26, 2005 Updated:August 11, 2006
Description: When starting xntpd with the -u option and specifying the group by using a string not a numeric gid the daemon uses the gid of the user not the group. This problem is now fixed by this update.
Alerts: