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LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 10, 2008

LWN.net: a ten-year timeline (part 1)

By Jonathan Corbet
January 9, 2008
LWN is about to celebrate a birthday. Picking the true anniversary of an enterprise like LWN can be a bit tricky - there are many points which could be said to mark the true birth of the organization. After some thought, we have decreed that LWN.net was born on January 30, 1998. So we have a tenth anniversary coming up. That's a long time - far longer than any of us thought we would be doing this. Life is funny that way, somehow.

One cannot let a date like this go by without at least partially taking advantage of its hype-creation possibilities. So there will be a few things happening to celebrate our decade of writing about Linux, culminating with some sort of celebration on the 30th, when your editor will be speaking at this year's (sold-out!) linux.conf.au in Melbourne, Australia. One of those will be a short series of articles - starting with this one - looking back at those ten years. What a long, strange trip it has been.

Back in early 1997, your editor was the manager of a software development, system administration, and data delivery group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He had, at that point, been using Linux for a few years. It was running on a number of servers, of course, but we had also deployed it on desktops and used it for the acquisition and display of meteorological data, including high-bandwidth (for the time) doppler radar data. Don't let anybody tell you that real-time Linux is a new thing.

At this time, your editor was seeing two futures: (1) an increasingly dilbertesque life spent mostly in meetings, and (2) the clearly bright future of Linux. So he was actively looking for ways to move out of conference rooms and toward Linux, and talking over schemes with a number of friends. An early idea - to commercialize one of the first weather stations ever put on the World Wide Web with LWN editor Forrest Cook, never quite took off. But that thought process continued.

During that same time, Elizabeth Coolbaugh had just left a very similar position at the same institution; she was looking for a new project for the next phase of her life. After some discussions, Liz and your editor settled on a business idea which seemed to have some promise. It was not to be the last silly decision they were to make.

You see, at that time there was a struggling Linux distributor named Red Hat which was beginning to get the sense that there might be a market for its boxed Linux product in the corporate world. But companies need support, and Red Hat lacked the ability to provide that support. So the company's management came up with the "support partner" concept. Upon being accepted into this program, partner companies would be able to sell Red Hat-backed support certificates, which Red Hat would help to market. This widespread network of Linux experts would be able to provide local support to clients and would, for the hardest problems, be able to get help from Red Hat itself. It looked like a winner for everybody involved.

That program was not yet operational at this time, though - but Red Hat promised it would be Real Soon Now. Your soon-to-be editors, not yet having done much business with Red Hat beyond ordering an occasional CD, believed this promise. But it still made sense to do something productive while waiting. The idea that emerged after some talk was to put up a regular newsletter about what was happening in the fast-evolving Linux community. Even back then, keeping up with everything was hard, so we figured that the service would be valuable. As an added bonus, it would attract attention to this new support company (called Eklektix) and show just how blindingly smart and up on Linux we were.

Discussion of details occurred slowly through much of 1997. On January 22, 1998, the first issue of LWN was posted; it talked about the 2.1.79 kernel, the brand-new spinlock mechanism, the devfs debate, the creation of Red Hat Advanced Development Labs, and attempts to bring Java to Linux. The January 29, 1998 issue changed the format and led off with Netscape's announcement that it would be releasing the source code for its browser. We also found all of two news articles about Linux (we posted every one we found in those days) and talked about NFS problems, the devfs debate, the Debian 2.0 release roadmap, and gcc 2.8 problems.

At this point, we had posted two issues, but had not actually told anybody about them. Unsurprisingly, traffic was low. That changed on January 30, when our announcement made it out to the comp.os.linux.announce newsgroup - the best way to get the news out at that time. As promotional text the announcement was rudimentary at best, but it had the desired result - we got over 1000 page views on that first day, which seemed like a lot at the time. LWN was off and running.

Some highlights from the early days of LWN:

  • February 12, 1998: Eric Raymond starts pushing "open source" instead of free software. Worries over whether Intel's proposed "Merced" architecture would support Linux.

  • February 19, 1998: Richard Stallman fights back against Open Source. SCO claims to be the largest provider of Unix-based servers. Jesse Berst's famous "could you get fired for choosing Linux?" article runs. Jaroslav Kysela launches the "Ultra" (later ALSA) sound driver project.

  • March 12, 1998: Ralph Nader suggests that Dell should sell Linux-installed systems.

  • March 19, 1998: Bruce Perens resigns from the Debian project, saying: "I'm sorry it had to be this way, but I feel that my mission to bring free software to the masses really isn't compatible with Debian any longer, and that I should be working with one of the more mainstream Linux distributions." Sendmail, Inc. was launched.

  • April 2, 1998: the Mozilla source release happens. Alan Cox joins Red Hat. The feature freeze for the 2.2 kernel is announced. The Open Group announces that use of the X Window System will requires fees - but Linux users had XFree86 and didn't care.

It's fair to say that we didn't entirely grasp the significance of the events reported in the April 2 edition. The hiring of Alan Cox was one of the first in a long series - before then, almost nobody actually had a job which involved developing Linux. The Open Group's attempt to relicense X was thoroughly defeated by the existence of a free version with an active development community - a story which would be repeated a number of times in the coming years.

  • April 30, 1998: Red Hat gets around to launching its support program, with Eklektix as one of the four they had managed to sign up. Kernel development halts as a result of the birth of Linus's second child.

  • May 28, 1998: LWN moves to its own domain at LWN.net. The Linux Standard Base is proposed. Your editor first describes himself as "grumpy" after producing LWN by himself (Liz was at Linux Expo). PC Week calls Linux "a communist operating system in a capitalist society" and predicts its demise. Red Hat 5.1 is released.

  • July 16, 1998: KDE 1.0 is released; KDE v. GNOME flamewars spread across numerous mailing lists and web sites.

  • July 23, 1998: Oracle ports some of its products to Linux. Linus decrees that 8MB of memory will be needed for the 2.2 kernel.

The Oracle announcement seems mundane now, but the existence of Oracle products for Linux was a specific indicator that many people were looking for. It was an indication that Linux was a "serious" platform. Richard Stallman, of course, thought that Oracle's announcement was terrible news.

  • July 30, 1998: Debian 2.0 is released. Rumors circulate that IBM is considering Linux. Linux-Mandrake is launched.

  • August 13, 1998: the Open Source Initiative is launched, flame wars result. Richard Stallman calls for free documentation for free software. The kernel goes into a "hard code freeze" - not the first or last time that a Linus-decreed freeze would prove to be less hard than anticipated. The devfs discussion continues. Red Hat states that it cannot legally ship Qt or KDE.

  • August 20, 1998: Red Hat launches Rawhide. Bruce Perens bails out of the Linux Standard Base effort.

  • October 1, 1998: Intel and Netscape (and two venture capital firms) invest in Red Hat. Also notable this week was the first of the big "Linus burnout" episodes, making it clear that something in the kernel development process needed to change.

Let us now pause for a moment. From this distance, it may be hard to appreciate just how big the news of the Red Hat investments was. For all that had happened, Linux was still a somewhat obscure phenomenon, unknown to much of the information technology world. When Intel put money into Red Hat, it became clear to all that both Linux and Red Hat were headed toward success. This was, in some real sense, the point where Linux entered the dotcom bubble, though the real action was still a year away.

The 2.1.123 release failed to compile as a result of some merging errors; developers got upset about the state of affairs and a long, inflammatory discussion resulted. Linus stormed out of the virtual room and took a vacation. It was a somewhat scary series of events which foreshadowed more to come; getting the kernel development process to scale as the community grew was a multi-year process.

During this time, LWN was also growing in both readership and size; it was taking increasing amounts of time. We eventually had to move the server from its initial location (behind an ISDN line in your editor's basement) to a proper hosting facility. But, remember, LWN was not the main endeavor; it was an attention attractor for the support services offered by Eklektix, Inc. This business plan was not going particularly well. Those who dealt with Red Hat in that era know that, as a company, it was a rather chaotic place. The marketing for the support partners never happened, and the backup services for the support plans the partners were able to sell themselves were, shall we say, less than the customers thought they deserved given what they had paid. The support partner program was not a big success for anybody involved.

As a result, one of the first things Red Hat did with its new pile of cash was to cancel this program and start building its own, internal support operation. Eklektix continued to push its own support offerings for a while, but the fact of the matter is that it was not a fun business: it seemed to mostly consist of cleaning up after low-budget ISPs which could not be bothered to install security updates. So the search for alternatives began. Meanwhile:

  • October 16, 1998: Larry McVoy contacts LWN and describes his upcoming "BitKeeper" software as a way of making Linus "scale". Debian takes an official position against KDE.

  • November 5, 1998: The Halloween Memo.

  • November 19, 1998: The Qt library becomes available under the new QPL, eliminating roadblocks for the distribution of KDE. VA Research (also known as VA Linux VA Software SourceForge) gets a big venture capital infusion. Red Hat hires Matthew Szulik as CEO.

  • The first LWN Linux timeline was released at the end of 1998.

  • January 28, 1999: LWN's first anniversary. The 2.2 kernel is released, complete with a trivially-exploited security hole. Linus decrees that 32-bit Linux will never support more than 2GB of memory. The TCP-wrappers distribution is compromised. The Windows refund movement gathers steam.

  • February 11, 1999: perhaps the first big discussion of binary-only modules.

  • February 25, 1999: IBM announces support for Red Hat Linux on its systems.

About this time, Eklektix announced that its new line of business would be training - and Linux system administration training in particular. The announcement was timed for the first ever LinuxWorld conference; both LWN editors spoke there, with Jon delivering a system administration tutorial to 450 attendees. It was the start of a new phase - though it was not much more successful than the one which came before.

If the investments in Red Hat were the beginning of the Linux bubble, LinuxWorld was where the inflation began in earnest. The amount of money on display there was impressive to say the least. The Red Hat party will live forevermore in the memory (or lack of memory, as the case may be) of all who attended. LinuxCare, which was supposed to be the big support success story for Linux, was unveiled at this conference. Never had there been so much overt commercial interest around Linux.

  • March 25, 1999: It turns out that BitKeeper is to come out under a not-really-open-source license.

  • April 8, 1999: Discouraged Mozilla developers resign from the project - there was a time when it seemed like a usable Mozilla browser would never come. Dell buys a piece of Red Hat. Al Gore claims to have an open source presidential campaign. RMS battles for "GNU/Linux" on linux-kernel.

  • April 15, 1999: the Mindcraft study. It turned out that some of Mindcraft's criticisms were right, but we fixed the problems in a hurry.

  • April 27, 1999: The last Linux Expo is held in Raleigh.

It is interesting to note that, during this time, LWN got its first acquisition offer: from Red Hat. We turned it down: the terms of the offer looked much like indentured servitude under firm Red Hat control. But we did work a deal with the company to supply news items for its portal site. Yes, during this time, Red Hat's business model was aiming toward becoming the dominant network portal for Linux-related information. Remember, this was 1999.

  • June 10, 1999: Red Hat files for its IPO. VA Linux bulks up on free software developers.

  • July 1, 1999: Slashdot is acquired by Andover.net. Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman feud over "open source."

  • July 22, 1999: Red Hat gives Linux hackers an opportunity to buy pre-IPO stock.

  • August 12, 1999: Red Hat goes public, with great success. Andover acquires Freshmeat.net. The second LinuxWorld conference is held.

The Red Hat IPO was the beginning of a new phase: clearly somebody was making a lot of money from Linux, even if who wasn't exactly clear. What was clear is that Eklektix was not on the list. When we planned out the training offering, we had a set of spreadsheets with some truly wonderful numbers on the income which was sure to result. Somehow reality failed to match the spreadsheets. So we came to realize that we needed to look in other directions.

At this time, advertising was beginning to bring in some actual money. But, more to the point, as the market heated up, companies were showing increasing amounts of interest in anybody who had any sort of Linux credibility or mindshare. We had some of that credibility at that time. So we decided to see what would happen if we let the word out that LWN was for sale. Suffice to say that the result was a far wilder ride than we could have ever anticipated. But that will be the topic of next week's installment.

Comments (26 posted)

Development issues part 1: Project communication

By Jake Edge
January 9, 2008

Free software projects, like all projects, live and die by their communications; developers must be able to talk to each other easily so that a consistent, coherent result emerges. But developers have differing ideas about what methods to use. A discussion on the Emacs development list provides a nice contrast between two of the main communications methods used by projects today.

Traditionally, developer communications have been handled by the venerable mailing list, but that is changing, at least for some projects. Internet relay chat (IRC) has become the tool of choice for newer projects, which may leave those who are not inclined towards realtime communication out of the loop. Development methodologies are evolving, and some are adopting the new ways more quickly than others – some may never adopt them at all.

The difference between communicating in IRC or via a mailing list is in some ways like the difference between text messaging and email. Email has its advantages, in that the recipient chooses the time to read and respond to the message, but it is often seen as slow. Text messaging or IRC have the advantage of speed; people receive a message and generally respond immediately. But that speed comes at a cost – interrupting the recipient. It also requires a full-time internet connection.

While email archives are somewhat cumbersome to use, they are usable. IRC logs are exceedingly painful as they are not subject-based; they just cover a specific time span of all conversation on the channel. Email conversations may play out over days or weeks, but they are generally easier to follow compared to the multiple interleaved conversations that occur on IRC channels. It is in the nature of the medium: IRC conversations are meant to be used immediately, not reread weeks later.

It is, in some ways, a culture clash. Younger developers tend to be more inclined towards realtime communications, while older hackers tend to be more comfortable with mailing lists. In what would seem to be an uphill battle, Eric S. Raymond has been advocating a more "modern" development style for GNU Emacs. His messages, appearing on Emacs-devel, champion a development style that includes IRC communication, a bug tracking system, and a version control system (VCS) more advanced than CVS.

Raymond's experiences working with the Battle for Wesnoth development team exposed him to some of the newer techniques used in project communication, particularly IRC. He reached a somewhat surprising conclusion about IRC:

And far from finding I can't keep up, I've discovered that I like the stimulation. I grok how the kids feel about this, because mailing-list-only projects have started to seem slow and boring to me, too.

The Wesnoth project uses IRC for all day-to-day design and development decisions, leaving the mailing list for more complicated discussions and white papers. This has the effect of excluding interested developers who are not able or willing to monitor an IRC channel throughout their day, but that is unlikely to be the intent. The reverse is also true: the perceived slow pace of mailing-list only projects has the effect of excluding those with a strong preference for a faster style of development. As Raymond shows, though, there is hope that members of one school can retrain – if they wish – for the other.

While decision making by IRC does not seem to be in the cards any time soon for Emacs, an upgrade to something other than CVS seems to have gained more traction. Richard Stallman has been asking a lot of questions about git while other developers discuss other distributed version control systems (DVCS), like darcs, monotone, arch, and Mercurial. Raymond is working on a survey of the VCS landscape that, once completed, he and others hope will guide the project into a better VCS choice.

One of the main DVCS features that seems of interest to Stallman is the "offline" capabilities. Having the entire history of a project and being able to do commits of work in progress while being disconnected from the internet are features that CVS does not have. Stallman is adamant that the tools used to develop Emacs be usable by those who are not always connected to the net which makes a DVCS rather attractive.

The Emacs project is one of the oldest free software projects in existence; it is, like its founder, fairly resistant to change. While Emacs itself is used by hackers everywhere, it is increasingly falling behind its competitors, at least partially because of the slow pace at which it is developed. Raymond's belief is that by upgrading the tools used to take advantage of advances made since CVS and mailman were new, the time between Emacs releases could be reduced to something more sane. Doing that could go a long way towards making Emacs more relevant to younger hackers:

When those Eclipse fans pointed and laughed because we're still stuck on CVS and don't have a bug tracker, what counter could I have had? They know these are bad choices and they know that I know it -- so when they write off Emacs as old, tired, and irrelevant to anything they're interested in, I find it increasingly difficult to reply.

It is unlikely that just some tool changes will be enough to resurrect the flagging popularity of Emacs, but there are hopeful signs. Some of Raymond's suggestions met a warmer reception than one might have expected. It is clear that a fair number of Emacs fans and developers are frustrated with the current state of affairs. It may be that "just some tool changes" are enough to reinvigorate the project to a point where it attracts more developers and users. That can only be a good thing for Emacs.

Comments (18 posted)

Development issues part 2: Bug tracking

By Jonathan Corbet
January 9, 2008
Once upon a time, free software was a relatively rare commodity, and there was a real novelty in being able to run a free package for a specific purpose. The availability of a free C compiler, for example, was cause for celebration. The fact that said compiler was not always the most reliable program on the system did little to reduce enthusiasm; many of us persisted in irrational endeavors (like trying to use gcc to build the X Window System) despite the occasionally painful (and predictable) consequences. And, in the process, we helped to make both programs more reliable.

There comes a time, though, when even the most die-hard free software proponent wishes that things would just work. As our software finds its way into more situations where failures are unwelcome (at best), the level of tolerance for bugs is falling. The desire for fewer flaws, however, runs counter to the desire for increasingly capable (and thus more complex) software. Somehow we have to find ways to simultaneously grow our systems and reduce the total number of bugs. To this end, a few projects have been having some interesting discussions on the tracking and fixing of bugs.

As has been discussed in this companion article, Eric Raymond has been busily stirring up trouble on the Emacs development list. His point, deemed reasonable by your editor, is that Emacs must adopt a number of relatively modern development practices if it is to have any hope of remaining relevant at all. One of his key points is that Emacs needs to have a real bug tracking system. Says Eric:

Now I consider Emacs: 1100K lines, a COCOMO estimate of over 328 years, and no issue database. I think I think I understand much better now now why the team has only been able to ship one release in five years. Trying to converge on a releasable state with as poor a view of the Emacs bug load as we have must be damn near impossible.

While some of Eric's suggestions appear to be non-starters - imagine trying to get Richard Stallman to hang out on an IRC channel - the bug tracker suggestion might just go somewhere. Certainly it could only be an improvement for a project of that size to have some sort of idea of what the current list of outstanding bugs looks like. It might even help bring about another Emacs release before the end of the decade.

Bug trackers are not a magical solution to the bug problem, though; in fact, they can create some problems of their own. The Fedora project, which does have a bug tracker, is currently trying to figure out what to do with the contents of that tracker. It seems that said tracker contains over 13,000 bugs, almost 10,000 of which apply to Fedora 7 and later.

A bug database of this size is simply overwhelming to anybody who tries to do something about it. As a result, Fedora users are filing bugs, only to see nothing happen in response. Not even a "thanks for your report" message. This situation is discouraging for everybody involved, causing Fedora users to give up on reporting bugs and developers to fear looking at the tracker.

In the Fedora case, there appears to be a near-consensus that the biggest problem is in triaging bug entries. This is not a job which can be automated; somebody has to go through bug submissions, weed out the duplicates, identify those which are really "features," figure out which developer should be notified, etc. Tying bug entries to those found in upstream trackers would be a highly useful bonus. Without this sort of effort, the bug tracker quickly fills with low-quality entries which help nobody.

For the most part, nobody is doing this job for Fedora now. Red Hat is not paying for a staff member to triage bugs, and the wider community has not filled this gap. In the short term, any sort of solution looks like it will have to come from the community, so the Fedora folks are wondering what can be done to encourage more participation. Simply asking for help is the obvious first step, as is making sure that the process is easy. Then they may consider the tactics adopted by other large projects - Mozilla's policy of expressing its appreciation by sending a T-shirt, for example.

As an aside, one of the more useful bits of information to come from this discussion was the existence of this family of URLs:

    http://bugz.fedoraproject.org/<package-name>

Fill in the name, and the result is an immediate list of open bugs for the given package. Thus, for example, a visit to bugz.fedoraproject.org/gcc yields a list of compiler bugs. This result can be had directly from bugzilla, of course, but this interface is faster and easier.

The Fedora developers have discussed a number of related issues, such as whether the Fedora bug database should be separated from the RHEL system and what can be done to make Red Hat better appreciate the value of doing more of its quality assurance work in the Fedora repository. But the core problem is just getting human attention applied to the bug reports. Digging through bug databases is a relatively unglamorous job; it is not an easy path toward rock-star hacker status. But it is an important and relatively easy way to help make free software better.

Just in time to serve as an example of how well bug management can work, the GNOME project has posted its annual bugzilla statistics. It seems that over 110,000 GNOME bugs were filed in 2007, almost 109,000 of them were closed. The top bug-closers for the year were:

14254Andre Klapper
9800 Tom Parker
7047 Susana Pereira
6882 Bruno Boaventura
6649 Pedro Villavicencio

It is worth pondering for a moment on the amount of energy required to close over 14,000 bugs in a year - that's almost 40 per day, every day, without a break. This kind of energy does exist within our community, and some projects are putting it to very good use.

While it is easy to get a contrary impression, the kernel does, in fact, have a bug tracker; there is also, in the form of Natalie Protasevich, somebody who handles the care and feeding of that tracker. But, as a recent episode shows, that still is not always sufficient to actually get the bugs fixed.

On November 13, 2007, a bug in the SCSI subsystem was reported to the linux-kernel mailing list. It was put into the tracker as bug 9370 on the same day. Some developers looked at it over the next few days, but, even though a specific commit which appeared to cause the bug had been identified, no solution was forthcoming. Discussion eventually died out. At least until January 2, when Ingo Molnar decided to stir the pot by posting a patch to revert the seemingly guilty commit. At that point the discussion picked up and a reliable way of reproducing the bug was found. The commit which was said to have caused the problem was, in fact, not guilty; it had just caused an older bug to come to light. The discussion did not stop there, though.

A number of charges went back and forth which do not require discussion here. But one core point is this: as long as the bug report sat in the tracker, nothing much appeared to be happening with it - though, it seems, the SCSI developers had not forgotten it and were trying to figure out what was really going on. But once the problem came back to the linux-kernel list in the form of a brute-force solution, the root cause was found in short order. The key here was bringing the problem to the attention of a wider group of people; the crucial recipe for reproducing the problem came from a developer who had not been looking at the problem previously.

In the kernel context, at least, giving wide exposure to a bug often helps immensely in getting that bug fixed. That is especially true for the sort of hard-to-reproduce bugs which tend to come up in kernel programming. So, while bug trackers are a useful tool for ensuring that problems do not fall through the cracks, it seems that one of the most potent anti-bug tools we have - discussing the problem via a widely-distributed email list - is the same tool we have been using for decades.

Comments (16 posted)

Yet another advertising update

In our continuing efforts to keep our readers informed, we wanted to update you on our recent advertising initiative. We are focusing our efforts this year (and hopefully beyond) on banner (or image) advertising. We won't neglect other opportunities, but we do want to more fully explore banner ads. To that end, we are currently running ads in a new location on the daily page, just to the right of the second entry. We also have plans to add more locations for banner ads of various sizes throughout the site.

Unfortunately, the need to "keep the lights on" here requires us to generate more income than we currently do. To start with, as with any business, our income must be greater than our expenses. Even with a great deal of fiscal restraint, low salaries, and very low overhead, that is not, yet, happening. We would like to see the business grow beyond just a minimal, break-even operation – we think our readers agree – which will take some time and experimentation.

We hope to strike the right balance between revenue generation and annoying our readers; we feel sure that you will let us know if we cross the line. We are always open to constructive suggestions (to lwn@lwn.net) about advertising and its placement on the site, but the most common suggestion, so far, is not particularly workable. A "no animated ads" policy becomes, essentially, a "no ads" policy. For better or worse, image ads are almost always animated.

Readers do have the ability to change things at their end. Firefox provides a means (by setting the image.animation_mode in about:config to "none") to turn off animations – other browsers do as well. Firefox plugins (or add-ons) give even more control over the display of images and ads. In addition, subscribers at the project leader level have the ability to turn off all ads on the site.

We have always tried to treat our readers with respect – as we would want to be treated – and will continue to do so. We do, however, need to find a way to make this enterprise sustain itself financially. We want to keep bringing you the excellent Linux and free software content that you have come to expect from LWN for many years to come.

Comments (57 posted)

Page editor: Jonathan Corbet

Security

Hiding open ports with shimmer

By Jake Edge
January 9, 2008

Open TCP or UDP ports on an internet-facing host can be worrisome to an administrator, they almost feel like an invitation to an attacker. If an unknown or unpatched vulnerability is running behind the port, the host could be compromised. Admins have come up with some reasonable ways to deflect the simplest of these attacks: changing the well-known port or port knocking. The new shimmer project provides a twist, by using cryptographic techniques to choose the port to open.

The basic idea is that one port (within a chosen range) will be open to real traffic of the service that the admin wants to hide – ssh or a private web server for example. The number of that port will be able to be calculated by both client and server using a secret that they share. A client that connects to the proper port gets forwarded to the real service. In addition to the proper port, 15 other ports are opened and connected to a blacklist service. Any connection made to those ports will result in the source IP address being banned for 15 minutes. The server redoes the calculation each minute, coming up with a new set of 16 ports – one good and 15 bad.

In order to calculate the port number, the shared secret (key) is combined with the time (to the nearest minute), and the name of the service, then hashed using SHA-256. The hash is used as an AES key to encrypt the numbers 0 through 15. Those values are mapped into the port range and serve as the 16 port numbers for that minute. In order to handle small clock variations between client and server, the server actually keeps each set of 16 open for three minutes – adding the set for the minutes before and after the current one.

While this seems like it provides a great deal of security to hide an open port behind, in reality it is more showy than useful. As with simple port knocking, or changing the well-known port number, it is vulnerable to an attacker that can monitor traffic to the server and observe successful connections. Shimmer leaves three ports wide open at any given time with 45 ports that will cause an IP to get blacklisted. Depending on the size of the port range chosen, the odds aren't that bad of randomly guessing the right port. Someone with few thousand IP addresses to use probably won't have any difficulty.

Much like the other techniques, shimmer will likely deflect all but the most determined of attackers, but is unlikely to provide much in the way of a barrier against those. It sounds attractive and uses cryptographic terms and techniques which may make it seem more secure than it really is. Using it without understanding this could lead to a false sense of security.

Comments (9 posted)

Security news

PostgreSQL releases critical security patches

The PostgreSQL team has released a set of patches for five critical security vulnerabilities. Two privilege escalation flaws and three denial of service vulnerabilities were fixed. "Today the PostgreSQL Global Development Group is releasing updated versions which patch five security vulnerabilities. These releases update all current PostgreSQL versions, including 8.2, 8.1, 8.0, 7.4 and 7.3. They are considered CRITICAL and PostgreSQL DBAs and sysadmins should install the update as soon as they reasonably can." Click below for more details.

Full Story (comments: none)

New vulnerabilities

Asterisk: denial of service

Package(s):asterisk CVE #(s):
Created:January 4, 2008 Updated:January 9, 2008
Description: Asterisk has issued a security advisory on a remote crash vulnerability in the SIP channel driver.
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0199 2008-01-03
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0198 2008-01-03

Comments (none posted)

cups: buffer overflow

Package(s):cups CVE #(s):CVE-2007-5848
Created:January 7, 2008 Updated:February 27, 2008
Description:

From the CVE entry:

Buffer overflow in CUPS in Apple Mac OS X 10.4.11 allows local admin users to execute arbitrary code via a crafted URI to the CUPS service.

From the rPath advisory:

Previous versions of the cups package contain a buffer-overflow weakness. It is not believed that this weakness can be exploited to execute malicious code.

Alerts:
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:050 2008-02-26
SuSE SUSE-SR:2008:002 2008-01-25
SuSE SUSE-SA:2008:002 2008-01-10
rPath rPSA-2008-0008-1 2008-01-05

Comments (1 posted)

dovecot: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):dovecot CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6598
Created:January 3, 2008 Updated:May 21, 2008
Description: Dovecot has multiple vulnerabilities including an issue involving the confusion between LDAP-authenticated logins across users with the same password and a denial of service involving a connecting user.
Alerts:
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0297-02 2008-05-21
Ubuntu USN-567-1 2008-01-10
Debian DSA-1457-1 2008-01-09
rPath rPSA-2008-0001-1 2008-01-03

Comments (none posted)

libcdio: buffer overflows

Package(s):libcdio CVE #(s):
Created:January 3, 2008 Updated:January 9, 2008
Description: The libcdio CD-ROM access library has two buffer overflow vulnerabilities involving long Joliet file names and the cdio buffer.
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0136 2008-01-03
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0104 2008-01-03

Comments (none posted)

mantis: cross-site scripting

Package(s):mantis CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6611
Created:January 7, 2008 Updated:March 4, 2008
Description:

From the CVE entry:

Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in view.php in Mantis before 1.1.0 allows remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via a filename.

Alerts:
Gentoo 200803-04 2008-03-03
Debian DSA-1467-1 2008-01-19
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0353 2008-01-07
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0282 2008-01-07

Comments (none posted)

maradns: denial of service

Package(s):maradns CVE #(s):CVE-2008-0061
Created:January 4, 2008 Updated:January 30, 2008
Description: MaraDNS 1.0 before 1.0.41, 1.2 before 1.2.12.08, and 1.3 before 1.3.07.04 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service via a crafted DNS packet that prevents an authoritative name (CNAME) record from resolving, aka "improper rotation of resource records."
Alerts:
Gentoo 200801-16 2008-01-29
Debian DSA-1445-1 2008-01-03

Comments (none posted)

opera: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):opera CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6520 CVE-2007-6521 CVE-2007-6522 CVE-2007-6523 CVE-2007-6524
Created:January 7, 2008 Updated:January 9, 2008
Description:

From the SUSE advisory:

CVE-2007-6520: Fixed an issue where plug-ins could be used to allow cross domain scripting, as reported by David Bloom. Details will be disclosed at a later date.

CVE-2007-6521: Fixed an issue with TLS certificates that could be used to execute arbitrary code, as reported by Alexander Klink (Cynops GmbH). Details will be disclosed at a later date.

CVE-2007-6522: Rich text editing can no longer be used to allow cross domain scripting, as reported by David Bloom. See our advisory.

CVE-2007-6523: Fixed a problem where malformed BMP files could cause Opera to temporarily freeze.

CVE-2007-6524: Prevented bitmaps from revealing random data from memory, as reported by Gynvael Coldwind. Details will be disclosed at a later date.

Alerts:
SuSE SUSE-SA:2008:001 2008-01-07

Comments (none posted)

PostgreSQL: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):postgresql CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6600 CVE-2007-4772 CVE-2007-6067 CVE-2007-4769 CVE-2007-6601
Created:January 9, 2008 Updated:March 6, 2008
Description: Several vulnerabilities have been found in the PostgreSQL database manager. The developers call the fixes "critical," but also note that, as of the time of the update, none of them were known to be exploited; see this advisory for more information.
Alerts:
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:059 2007-03-05
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0134-01 2008-02-21
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0040-01 2008-02-01
Gentoo 200801-15 2008-01-29
rPath rPSA-2008-0016-1 2008-01-15
Ubuntu USN-568-1 2008-01-14
Debian DSA-1463-1 2008-01-14
Debian DSA-1460-1 2008-01-13
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0552 2008-01-11
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0478 2008-01-11
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0039-01 2008-01-11
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0038-01 2008-01-11
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:004 2008-01-09

Comments (none posted)

python-cherrypy: unauthorized file access via malicious cookie

Package(s):python-cherrypy CVE #(s):CVE-2008-0252
Created:January 9, 2008 Updated:February 6, 2008
Description:

From the Fedora advisory:

Malicious cookies may allow access to files outside the session directory.

Alerts:
Debian DSA-1481-1 2008-02-05
Gentoo 200801-11 2008-01-27
rPath rPSA-2008-0030-1 2008-01-24
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0333 2008-01-07
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0299 2008-01-07

Comments (none posted)

qt4: security restriction bypass

Package(s):qt4 CVE #(s):CVE-2007-5965
Created:January 3, 2008 Updated:February 21, 2008
Description: Trolltech Qt has a privilege escalation vulnerability. An error can be triggered in QSslSocket when verifying SSL certificates, attackers can use this to bypass the SSL certificate verification and acquire unauthorized access to a vulnerable application.
Alerts:
Ubuntu USN-579-1 2008-02-20
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:042 2008-02-07
SuSE SUSE-SR:2008:002 2008-01-25
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4285 2008-01-03
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4354 2008-01-03

Comments (1 posted)

tcpreen: denial of service

Package(s):tcpreen CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6562
Created:January 3, 2008 Updated:January 9, 2008
Description: The tcpreen TCP connection monitoring tool has multiple buffer overflow vulnerabilities, these may be used to cause a denial of service.
Alerts:
Debian DSA-1443-1 2008-01-03

Comments (none posted)

tog-pegasus: stack buffer overflow

Package(s):tog-pegasus CVE #(s):CVE-2008-0003
Created:January 8, 2008 Updated:January 11, 2008
Description: During a security audit, a stack buffer overflow flaw was found in the PAM authentication code in the OpenPegasus CIM management server. An unauthenticated remote user could trigger this flaw and potentially execute arbitrary code with root privileges.
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0572 2008-01-11
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0506 2008-01-11
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0002-01 2008-01-07

Comments (none posted)

unp: code execution via malicious file names

Package(s):unp CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6610
Created:January 9, 2008 Updated:January 9, 2008
Description: The unp unpacking tool (prior to version 1.0.14) does not properly check file names, allowing the execution of shell commands.
Alerts:
Gentoo 200801-01 2008-01-09

Comments (none posted)

wordpress: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):wordpress CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6013 CVE-2007-6318
Created:January 3, 2008 Updated:January 9, 2008
Description: The Wordpress online publishing and weblog utility has multiple SQL injection vulnerabilities in versions 2.3.1 and earlier. Remote attackers can use this to execute arbitrary SQL commands via the s parameter.
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0103 2008-01-03
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0126 2008-01-03

Comments (none posted)

wzdftpd: denial of service

Package(s):wzdftpd CVE #(s):CVE-2007-5300
Created:January 7, 2008 Updated:January 9, 2008
Description:

From the CVE entry:

Off-by-one error in the do_login_loop function in libwzd-core/wzd_login.c in wzdftpd 0.8.0, 0.8.2, and possibly other versions and earlier allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon crash) via a long USER command that triggers a stack-based buffer overflow.

Alerts:
Debian DSA-1452-1 2008-01-06

Comments (none posted)

Updated vulnerabilities

apache2: information disclosure

Package(s):apache CVE #(s):CVE-2007-1862
Created:June 20, 2007 Updated:February 18, 2008
Description: From the Mandriva advisory: "The recall_headers function in mod_mem_cache in Apache 2.2.4 does not properly copy all levels of header data, which can cause Apache to return HTTP headers containing previously-used data, which could be used to obtain potentially sensitive information by unauthorized users."
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-1711 2008-02-15
Fedora FEDORA-2007-0704 2007-06-26
Mandriva MDKSA-2007:127 2007-06-19

Comments (2 posted)

apache: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):apache CVE #(s):CVE-2007-3304 CVE-2006-5752
Created:June 27, 2007 Updated:February 18, 2008
Description: The Apache HTTP Server did not verify that a process was an Apache child process before sending it signals. A local attacker who has the ability to run scripts on the Apache HTTP Server could manipulate the scoreboard and cause arbitrary processes to be terminated, which could lead to a denial of service. (CVE-2007-3304)

A flaw was found in the Apache HTTP Server mod_status module. Sites with the server-status page publicly accessible and ExtendedStatus enabled were vulnerable to a cross-site scripting attack. On Red Hat Enterprise Linux the server-status page is not enabled by default and it is best practice to not make this publicly available. (CVE-2006-5752)

Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-1711 2008-02-15
SuSE SUSE-SA:2007:061 2007-11-19
Fedora FEDORA-2007-2214 2007-09-18
rPath rPSA-2007-0182-1 2007-09-14
Ubuntu USN-499-1 2007-08-16
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0662-01 2007-07-13
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0557-01 2007-07-13
Fedora FEDORA-2007-615 2007-07-12
Mandriva MDKSA-2007:142 2007-07-04
Mandriva MDKSA-2007:141 2007-07-04
Mandriva MDKSA-2007:140 2007-07-04
Fedora FEDORA-2007-617 2007-07-02
rPath rPSA-2007-0136-1 2007-06-27
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0556-01 2007-06-26
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0534-01 2007-06-26
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0533-01 2007-06-27
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0532-01 2007-06-26

Comments (1 posted)

apache: cross-site scripting

Package(s):apache CVE #(s):CVE-2006-3918
Created:August 9, 2006 Updated:April 4, 2008
Description: From the Red Hat advisory: "A bug was found in Apache where an invalid Expect header sent to the server was returned to the user in an unescaped error message. This could allow an attacker to perform a cross-site scripting attack if a victim was tricked into connecting to a site and sending a carefully crafted Expect header."
Alerts:
SuSE SUSE-SA:2008:021 2008-04-04
Ubuntu USN-575-1 2008-02-04
SuSE SUSE-SA:2006:051 2006-09-08
Debian DSA-1167-1 2005-09-04
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0619-01 2006-08-10
Red Hat RHSA-2006:0618-01 2006-08-08

Comments (none posted)

apache2: denial of service

Package(s):apache2 CVE #(s):CVE-2007-1863
Created:November 19, 2007 Updated:February 18, 2008
Description:

From the CVE entry:

cache_util.c in the mod_cache module in Apache HTTP Server (httpd), when caching is enabled and a threaded Multi-Processing Module (MPM) is used, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (child processing handler crash) via a request with the (1) s-maxage, (2) max-age, (3) min-fresh, or (4) max-stale Cache-Control headers without a value.

Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-1711 2008-02-15
SuSE SUSE-SA:2007:061 2007-11-19

Comments (1 posted)

httpd: denial of service, cross-site scripting

Package(s):apache httpd CVE #(s):CVE-2007-3847 CVE-2007-4465
Created:September 25, 2007 Updated:February 15, 2008
Description: A flaw was found in the mod_proxy module. On sites where a reverse proxy is configured, a remote attacker could send a carefully crafted request that would cause the Apache child process handling that request to crash. On sites where a forward proxy is configured, an attacker could cause a similar crash if a user could be persuaded to visit a malicious site using the proxy. This could lead to a denial of service if using a threaded Multi-Processing Module. (CVE-2007-3847)

A flaw was found in the mod_autoindex module. On sites where directory listings are used, and the AddDefaultCharset directive has been removed from the configuration, a cross-site-scripting attack may be possible against browsers which do not correctly derive the response character set following the rules in RFC 2616. (CVE-2007-4465)

Alerts:
Slackware SSA:2008-045-02 2008-02-15
Ubuntu USN-575-1 2008-02-04
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0008-01 2008-01-15
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0006-01 2008-01-15
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0005-01 2008-01-15
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0004-01 2008-01-15
Mandriva MDKSA-2007:235 2007-12-03
SuSE SUSE-SA:2007:061 2007-11-19
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0747-02 2007-11-15
Gentoo 200711-06 2007-11-07
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0746-04 2007-11-07
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0911-01 2007-10-25
Fedora FEDORA-2007-707 2007-09-24

Comments (none posted)

asterisk: possible SQL injection

Package(s):asterisk CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6170
Created:December 3, 2007 Updated:April 15, 2008
Description: Tilghman Lesher discovered that the logging engine of Asterisk, a free software PBX and telephony toolkit, performs insufficient sanitizing of call-related data, which may lead to SQL injection.
Alerts:
Gentoo 200804-13 2008-04-14
SuSE SUSE-SR:2008:005 2008-03-06
Debian DSA-1417-1 2007-12-02

Comments (none posted)

autofs: privilege escalation

Package(s):autofs CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6285
Created:December 21, 2007 Updated:January 14, 2008
Description: The default configuration for autofs 5 (autofs5) on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 and 5 does not specify the nodev mount option for the -hosts map, which allows local users to access "important devices" by operating a remote NFS server and creating special device files on that server.
Alerts:
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:009-1 2007-01-12
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:009 2007-01-11
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4707 2007-12-21
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4709 2007-12-21
Red Hat RHSA-2007:1177-01 2007-12-20
Red Hat RHSA-2007:1176-01 2007-12-20

Comments (1 posted)

autofs: insecure default configuration

Package(s):autofs CVE #(s):CVE-2007-5964
Created:December 12, 2007 Updated:January 14, 2008
Description: Versions of the autofs automounter daemon as shipped by Red Hat (and possibly other distributors) are installed with an insecure configuration; in particular, the "hosts" map lacks the "nosuid" option, allowing an attacker who has control over an NFS server to run setuid programs on vulnerable systems.
Alerts:
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:009-1 2007-01-12
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:009 2007-01-11
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4707 2007-12-21
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4469 2007-12-15
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4532 2007-12-15
Red Hat RHSA-2007:1129-01 2007-12-12
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4709 2007-12-21
Red Hat RHSA-2007:1128-01 2007-12-12

Comments (none posted)

bind: insecure permissions

Package(s):bind CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6283
Created:December 21, 2007 Updated:July 10, 2008
Description: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Fedora install the Bind /etc/rndc.key file with world-readable permissions, which allows local users to perform unauthorized named commands, such as causing a denial of service by stopping named.
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-6281 2008-07-09
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0300-02 2008-05-21
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0903 2008-01-22
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4655 2007-12-20
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4658 2007-12-20

Comments (1 posted)

cacti: SQL injection vulnerability

Package(s):cacti CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6035
Created:November 22, 2007 Updated:February 18, 2008
Description: Versions of Cacti prior to 0.8.7a have an SQL injection vulnerability. Remote attackers can execute arbitrary SQL commands via unspecified vectors.
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-1737 2008-02-15
Fedora FEDORA-2008-1699 2008-02-15
Debian DSA-1418-1 2007-12-02
Mandriva MDKSA-2007:231 2007-11-22
Fedora FEDORA-2007-3683 2007-11-22
Gentoo 200712-02:02 2007-12-05
SuSE SUSE-SR:2007:024 2007-11-22
Fedora FEDORA-2007-3667 2007-11-22

Comments (none posted)

cacti: denial of service

Package(s):cacti CVE #(s):CVE-2007-3112 CVE-2007-3113
Created:September 18, 2007 Updated:February 18, 2008
Description: A vulnerability in Cacti 0.8.6i and earlier versions allows remote authenticated users to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption) via large values of the graph_start, graph_end, graph_height, or graph_width parameters.
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-1737 2008-02-15
Fedora FEDORA-2007-3683 2007-11-22
Fedora FEDORA-2007-2199 2007-09-18
Mandriva MDKSA-2007:184 2007-09-17

Comments (none posted)

cairo: integer overflow

Package(s):Cairo CVE #(s):CVE-2007-5503
Created:November 29, 2007 Updated:April 10, 2008
Description: Cairo has an integer overflow vulnerability in the PNG image processing code. If a user processes a specially crafted PNG image with an application that is linked against cairo, arbitrary code can be executed with the user's privileges.
Alerts:
Debian DSA-1542-1 2008-04-09
SuSE SUSE-SR:2008:003 2008-02-07
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:019 2007-01-21
Fedora FEDORA-2007-3818 2008-01-16
rPath rPSA-2008-0015-1 2008-01-15
Ubuntu USN-550-3 2007-12-13
Ubuntu USN-550-2 2007-12-10
Gentoo 200712-04 2007-12-09
Ubuntu USN-550-1 2007-12-03
Slackware SSA:2007-337-01 2007-12-04
Red Hat RHSA-2007:1078-02 2007-11-29

Comments (none posted)

clamav: denial of service

Package(s):clamav CVE #(s):CVE-2007-3725
Created:July 24, 2007 Updated:February 27, 2008
Description: A NULL pointer dereference has been discovered in the RAR VM of Clam Antivirus (ClamAV) which allows user-assisted remote attackers to cause a denial of service via a specially crafted RAR archives.
Alerts:
SuSE SUSE-SR:2007:015 2007-08-03
Gentoo 200708-04 2007-08-09
Mandriva MDKSA-2007:150 2007-07-25
Debian DSA-1340-1 2007-07-24

Comments (none posted)

clamav: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):clamav CVE #(s):CVE-2007-4510 CVE-2007-4560
Created:September 3, 2007 Updated:February 13, 2008
Description: Several remote vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Clam anti-virus toolkit. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems:

CVE-2007-4510: It was discovered that the RTF and RFC2397 parsers can be tricked into dereferencing a NULL pointer, resulting in denial of service.

CVE-2007-4560: It was discovered clamav-milter performs insufficient input sanitizing, resulting in the execution of arbitrary shell commands.

Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-1608 2008-02-13
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0170 2008-01-22
Gentoo 200709-14 2007-09-20
Fedora FEDORA-2007-2050 2007-09-07
Mandriva MDKSA-2007:172 2007-08-31
Debian DSA-1366-1 2007-09-01

Comments (none posted)

clamav: mystery vulnerability

Package(s):clamav CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6337
Created:December 31, 2007 Updated:January 22, 2008
Description: Clamav contains "an unspecified vulnerability" associated with the bzip2 decompression code.
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0115 2008-01-22
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0170 2008-01-22
SuSE SUSE-SR:2008:001 2008-01-09
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:003 2007-01-08
Gentoo 200712-20 2007-12-29

Comments (1 posted)

clamav: integer overflow and off-by-one

Package(s):clamav CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6335 CVE-2007-6336
Created:December 19, 2007 Updated:July 17, 2008
Description: ClamAV contains integer overflow and off-by-one errors which could be exploited (via specially-crafted email) to execute arbitrary code.
Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2008-6422 2008-07-17
Fedora FEDORA-2008-1625 2008-02-13
Fedora FEDORA-2008-1608 2008-02-13
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0115 2008-01-22
Fedora FEDORA-2008-0170 2008-01-22
SuSE SUSE-SR:2008:001 2008-01-09
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:003 2007-01-08
Debian DSA-1435-1 2007-12-19
Gentoo 200712-20 2007-12-29

Comments (none posted)

cups: denial of service

Package(s):cups CVE #(s):CVE-2007-0720
Created:March 26, 2007 Updated:February 7, 2008
Description: Previous versions of the cups package could be forced to hang via a client "partially negotiating" an ssl connection. In this state, cups would not allow other connections to be made, a denial of service.
Alerts:
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:036 2007-02-06
Mandriva MDKSA-2007:086 2007-04-16
Red Hat RHSA-2007:0123-01 2007-04-16
Gentoo 200703-28 2007-03-31
Foresight FLEA-2007-0003-1 2007-03-25

Comments (none posted)

cups: multiple vulnerabilities

Package(s):cups CVE #(s):CVE-2007-5849 CVE-2007-6358 CVE-2007-4352 CVE-2007-5392 CVE-2007-5393
Created:December 19, 2007 Updated:April 3, 2008
Description: The cups 1.3.5 release fixes a number of vulnerabilities in the PDF filters. Additionally, there is a buffer overflow in the SNMP code and a temporary file vulnerability.
Alerts:
Debian DSA-1537-1 2008-04-02
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:036 2007-02-06
Debian DSA-1480-1 2008-02-05
SuSE SUSE-SR:2008:002 2008-01-25
SuSE SUSE-SA:2008:002 2008-01-10
Ubuntu USN-563-1 2008-01-09
Debian DSA-1437-1 2007-12-26
Gentoo 200712-14 2007-12-18

Comments (none posted)

debian-goodies: privilege escalation

Package(s):debian-goodies CVE #(s):CVE-2007-3912
Created:October 5, 2007 Updated:March 24, 2008
Description: Thomas de Grenier de Latour discovered that the checkrestart program included in debian-goodies did not correctly handle shell meta-characters. A local attacker could exploit this to gain the privileges of the user running checkrestart.
Alerts:
Debian DSA-1527-1 2008-03-24
Ubuntu USN-526-1 2007-10-04

Comments (none posted)

Django: denial of service

Package(s):Django CVE #(s):CVE-2007-5712
Created:November 12, 2007 Updated:May 21, 2008
Description:

From the CVE notice:

The internationalization (i18n) framework in Django 0.91, 0.95, 0.95.1, and 0.96, and as used in other products such as PyLucid, when the USE_I18N option and the i18n component are enabled, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory consumption) via many HTTP requests with large Accept-Language headers.

Alerts:
Fedora FEDORA-2007-2788 2007-11-09
Fedora FEDORA-2007-3157 2007-11-09

Comments (none posted)

dovecot: privilege escalation

Package(s):dovecot CVE #(s):CVE-2007-4211
Created:August 15, 2007 Updated:May 21, 2008
Description: From the rPath advisory: "Previous versions of the dovecot package are vulnerable to a minor privilege escalation attack in which an authenticated user may exploit an ACL plugin weakness to save message flags without having proper permissions."
Alerts:
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0297-02 2008-05-21
Fedora FEDORA-2007-664 2007-08-20
rPath rPSA-2007-0161-1 2007-08-14

Comments (none posted)

dovecot: directory traversal

Package(s):dovecot CVE #(s):CVE-2007-2231
Created:May 8, 2007 Updated:May 21, 2008
Description: Directory traversal vulnerability in index/mbox/mbox-storage.c in Dovecot before 1.0.rc29, when using the zlib plugin, allows remote attackers to read arbitrary gzipped (.gz) mailboxes (mbox files) via a .. (dot dot) sequence in the mailbox name.
Alerts:
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0297-02 2008-05-21
Debian DSA-1359-1 2007-08-28
Ubuntu USN-487-1 2007-07-17
Fedora FEDORA-2007-493 2007-05-07

Comments (none posted)

e2fsprogs: integer overflows

Package(s):e2fsprogs CVE #(s):CVE-2007-5497
Created:December 7, 2007 Updated:February 12, 2008
Description: Rafal Wojtczuk of McAfee AVERT Research discovered that e2fsprogs, ext2 file system utilities and libraries, contained multiple integer overflows in memory allocations, based on sizes taken directly from filesystem information. These could result in heap-based overflows potentially allowing the execution of arbitrary code.
Alerts:
Foresight FLEA-2008-0005-1 2008-02-11
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4447 2008-01-16
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4461 2008-01-16
Red Hat RHSA-2008:0003-01 2008-01-07
Gentoo 200712-13 2007-12-18
rPath rPSA-2007-0262-1 2007-12-11
Debian DSA-1422 2007-12-07
Mandriva MDKSA-2007:242 2007-12-10
Ubuntu USN-555-1 2007-12-08

Comments (none posted)

eggdrop: stack-based buffer overflow

Package(s):eggdrop CVE #(s):CVE-2007-2807
Created:September 7, 2007 Updated:January 7, 2008
Description: A stack-based buffer overflow in mod/server.mod/servrmsg.c in Eggdrop 1.6.18, and possibly earlier, allows user-assisted, malicious remote IRC servers to execute arbitrary code via a long private message.
Alerts:
Debian DSA-1448-1 2008-01-05
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4325 2007-12-10
Fedora FEDORA-2007-4305 2007-12-10
Gentoo 200709-07 2007-09-15
Mandriva MDKSA-2007:175 2007-09-06

Comments (none posted)

emacs: buffer overflow

Package(s):emacs CVE #(s):CVE-2007-6109
Created:December 10, 2007 Updated:May 6, 2008
Description:

From the National Vulnerability Database:

Buffer overflow in emacs allows attackers to have an unknown impact, as demonstrated via a vector involving the command line.

Alerts:
Ubuntu USN-607-1 2008-05-06
SuSE SUSE-SR:2008:003 2008-02-07
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:034 2007-02-04
Gentoo 200712-03 2007-12-09

Comments (none posted)

emacs: command execution via local variables

Package(s):emacs CVE #(s):CVE-2007-5795
Created:November 14, 2007 Updated:February 5, 2008
Description: From the original Debian problem report: "In Debian's version of GNU Emacs 22.1+1-2, the `hack-local-variables' function does not behave correctly when `enable-local-variables' is set to :safe. The documentation of `enable-local-variables' states that the value :safe means to set only safe variables, as determined by `safe-local-variable-p' and `risky-local-variable-p' (and the data driving them), but Emacs ignores this and instead sets all the local variables." When this setting (which is not the default) is in effect, opening a hostile file could lead to the execution of arbitrary commands.
Alerts:
Mandriva MDVSA-2008:034 2007-02-04
Gentoo 200712-03 2007-12-09
Ubuntu USN-541-1 2007-11-13
Fedora FEDORA-2007-2946 2007-11-17
Fedora FEDORA-2007-3056 2007-11-17

Comments (1 posted)

evolution: format string error

Package(s):evolution CVE #(s):CVE-2007-1002
Created:March 27, 2007 Updated:February 27, 2008
Description: A format string error in the "write_html()" function in calendar/gui/ e-cal-component-memo-preview.c when displaying a memo's categories can potentially be exploited to execute arbitrary code via a specially crafted shared memo containing format specifiers.
Alerts:
SuSE SUSE-SR:2007:015 2007-08-03
Gentoo 200706-02 2007-06-06
Re