Our first site code upgrade in nearly four years introduces
an integrated security alert and vulnerability database.
Our archive of security alerts dating back to July, 2001
now lives in a PostgreSQL relational database.
Vulnerabilities and alerts are actually linked to each other.
Recent alerts and vulnerabilities use
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)
numbers to uniquely identify each vulnerability.
Today you can browse alerts and vulnerabilities
using the links at the top of each page.
When viewing an alert, you can view the corresponding
vulnerability description with a mouse click.
In the future expect, and please continue to suggest, ways
for us to better provide you with the security information
you seek.
The collective security weakness of the outstanding issues listed
below is staggering. The following is a list of the most serious
problems for which most other Linux vendors have provided updates on
their US sites. It represents the outstanding security problems
associated with the limited TurboLinux distributions and updates that
have been available on the US sites only.
LWN has pointed out in the past that Turbolinux has not been serious about security updates. With luck this advisory - or, perhaps, the UnitedLinux effort - will help get this distributor back on track.
Scott Wimer, Chief Technology Officer of Cylant, dicusses preventive security in this paper.
The recent vulnerabilities with OpenSSH software demonstrate that even intensive auditing cannot necessarily root out all the defects from software. As software systems become larger and more complex, intensive auditing becomes more expensive and more difficult. Software audits
simply cannot be relied upon to find all of the security vulnerabilities in any given system.
C't has published
a study of eleven biometric access controls intended to prevent unauthorized access.
"In our attempts at outfoxing the protective programs and devices we have concentrated on the first method: direct attempts at deceiving the systems with the aid of obvious procedures (such as the reactivation of latent images) and obvious feature forgeries (photographs, videos, silicon fingerprints)."
Brian McWilliams reports on the recent contamination of Fragroute
with a backdoor.
"According to program developer Dug Song, the source code to the Dsniff, Fragroute, and Fragrouter security tools was contaminated on May 17th after an attacker gained unauthorized access to his site, Monkey.org."
Note: Copies of Dsniff, Fragroute or Fragrouter downloaded
from Monkey.org between May 17th and May 24th are contaminated and
require replacement. For more details, see Dug Song's post to bugtraq about the incident.
IDS is a CGI script that generates a multi-gallery photo album for a website on the fly. IDS 0.8x is reported to have a directory disclosure vulnerability.
Steve Gustin has reported multiple vulnerabilities in the csPassword.cgi
script from CGIscript.net
"Make sure you only allow trusted users to use the
csPassword application and make sure your web server
in configured to deny requests for .ht* and *.tmp
files."
Volution Manager stores the unencrypted Directory Administrator's password
in the /etc/ldap/slapd.conf file. This vulnerability will be corrected in
the next release of Volution Manager.
Here is an advisory from the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT)
regarding the denial of service vulnerability in version 9 of the BIND
nameserver, up to 9.2.1. An attacker can send a properly crafted packet
which triggers a check within BIND and causes it to shut down. The
vulnerability can not be exploited for any purpose beyond denial of
service, but that is bad enough; if you are running BIND 9, an upgrade
is probably a good idea.
Note that many or most systems out there will still be running
BIND 8, and thus will not be vulnerable.
Ghostscript may be used to execute arbitrary commands with a maliciously formed PostScript file.
Since ghostscript is frequently used while printing documents, updating
is strongly recommended.
The vulnerability has been fixed in the 6.53 source release of GNU Ghostscript.
Barry A. Warsaw announced
the release of Mailman 2.0.11
"which fixes two
cross-site scripting exploits, one reported by "office" in the admin
login page, and another reported by Tristan Roddis in the Pipermail
index summaries.
It is recommended that all sites upgrade their 2.0.x systems to this
version."
The nss_ldap package includes the pam_ldap module for
authenticating a user with an LDAP database.
Pam_ldap versions prior to 144 have a string format
bug in the logging mechanism.
A buffer overflow in tcpdump can be triggered by a bad NFS packet when
tracing the network. Unmodified tcpdump versions 3.6.2 and earlier are vulnerable.
A malicious IRC server may
return a response to a /dns query that executes arbitrary commands
with the privileges of the user running XChat.
Versions of XChat prior to 1.8.9 are vulnerable.
Ethereal 0.9.3 fixed three
packet handling vulnerabilities present in 0.9.2 when it was released
by the ethereal team on March 30th.
The PROTOS test
suite found some flaws in SNMP and LDAP protocols support.
Malformed packets could also crash ethereal 0.9.2 due to a
ASN.1 zero-length g_malloc problem.
The zlib "double free" vulnerability
was addressed by the updates for that bug from many distributors. (First LWN
report: May 2).
Update: The May 19, 2002 release of Ethereal 0.9.4
fixes four potential security issues in Ethereal 0.9.3.Please see
the new vulnerability for more information.
Fetchmail versions prior to 5.9.10 have a buffer overflow vulnerability
that may be exploited by a malicious IMAP server.
The fetchmail client allocated memory to store the sizes of the
messages it is attempting to retrieve based on
a message count provided by the IMAP server.
A malicious IMAP server could provide an artifically
large message count to force the
fetchmail process to write data outside of the allocated memory. (First LWN
report: May 9).
UW imapd versions 2000c and prior allow remote authenticated users to execute code via a buffer overflow. A malicious user can craft
a request to run commands on the server under their UID and GID.
(First LWN report: May 23).
The OpenSSH developers have
released OpenSSH 3.2.2. Security fixes in this release are:
"
- fixed buffer overflow in Kerberos/AFS token passing
- fixed overflow in Kerberos client code
- sshd no longer auto-enables Kerberos/AFS
- experimental support for privilege separation [...]
- only accept RSA keys of size SSH_RSA_MINIMUM_MODULUS_SIZE (768) or larger"
(First LWN report: May 23).
UTF8 interaction bug in the perl-Digest-MD5 module
Package(s):
perl-Digest-MD5
CVE #(s):
Created:
June 5, 2002
Updated:
June 5, 2002
Description:
Versions prior to 2.20 of the perl-Digest-MD5 module have a bug
in the UTF8 interaction with perl that produces UTF8 strings
with improper MD5 digests.
(First LWN
report: May 16).
We encourage dhcp users to upgrade, disable dhcp or, at a minimum,
consider
using ingress filtering as described in the CERT advisory.
(First LWN
report: May 16).
Note: Distributions which use version 2 of ISC DHCP, such as Red Hat
Linux,
are not vulnerable.
A race
condition in rm may cause the root user to delete the whole filesystem.
The problem exists in the version of rm in
fileutils
4.1 stable and 4.1.6 development version. A patch
is available.
(First LWN
report: May 2).
The glibc filename globbing code has a buffer overflow problem.
For those who are interested, Global InterSec LLC has provided
a detailed description
of this vulnerability.
This problem was first reported by LWN on December 20th.
Versions of
imlib prior to 1.9.13 used the NetPBM package in ways which
"make it possible
for attackers to create image files such that when loaded via software
which uses Imlib, could crash the program or potentially allow arbitrary
code to be executed."
(First LWN
report: March 28).
Cross-site scripting vulnerability in Horde/IMP 2.2.7 and 3.0
Package(s):
imp horde/imp
CVE #(s):
Created:
May 21, 2002
Updated:
June 19, 2002
Description:
Version 2.2.8 of IMP has been released, it
fixes some vulnerabilities. "The Horde team announces the
availability of IMP 2.2.8, which prevents some potential cross-site
scripting (CSS) attacks." Upgrading
to IMP 3.1 or, at least, 2.2.8 is recommended
(First LWN
report: April 11, 2002).
Update: IMP 3.0, which was initially believed to be
immune, is also vulnerable. The problem
is fixed in IMP 3.1.
This XMLHttpRequest security
bug impacts all Mozilla-based browsers. "The bug is found in versions of
Mozilla from 0.9.7 to 0.9.9 on various operating
system platforms, and in Netscape versions 6.1 and
higher."
(First LWN
report: May 2).
Pine has an
unpleasant
vulnerability in URL handling vulnerability which can lead to
command execution by remote attackers.
(First LWN report: January 17th).
This vulnerability is remotely exploitable; updating is a good idea.
Note: If an update isn't yet available for your distribution,
setting enable-msg-view-urls to "off" in pine's setup will
avoid the vulnerability. (Thanks to Greg Herlein).
According to the CVE entry,
"uudecode, as available in the sharutils package before 4.2.1, does not
check whether the filename of the uudecoded file is a pipe or symbolic
link, which could allow attackers to overwrite files or execute commands."
(First LWN
report: May 16).
Version 3.5.2 fixed a
buffer overflow vulnerability in all prior versions. However,
newer versions, including 3.6.2, are vulnerable to another
buffer overflow in the AFS RPC functions that was reported by
Nick Cleaton.
(First LWN
report: May 9).
Both problems appear to have been reported and fixed in FreeBSD some months
ago. The CIAC
report on the vulnerability in versions prior to 3.5.2 is dated October
31, 2000. Nick Cleaton's FreeBSD
security advisory on the AFS RPC bug, and reference to a fix for
FreeBSD, is dated July, 17, 2001. Tcpdump 3.7 was released on January 21,
2002.
This vulnerability,
originally thought to be confined to BSD-derived systems, was first covered
in the July 26th Security
Summary. It is now known that Linux telnet daemons are vulnerable as
well.
Most SNMP
implementations out there have a variety of buffer overflow vulnerabilities
and should be upgraded at first opportunity. See this CERT advisory for more. (First
LWN report: February 14).
webalizer: reverse DNS buffer overflow vulnerability
Package(s):
webalizer
CVE #(s):
Created:
May 21, 2002
Updated:
January 27, 2003
Description:
The cause is a buffer overflow bug.
This one sounds nasty.
If reverse DNS lookups are enabled in webalizer,
"an attacker with control over the victims DNS may spoof responses thus
triggering a buffer overflow, potentially leading to a root compromise."
Webalizer 2.01-10 "fixes this and a few
other buglets that have been discovered in the last month or so".
(First LWN report: April 18th, 2002).
This one is scary. The session ID
spoofing vulnerability allows the "possibility that arbitrary
commands may be executed with root privileges."
Upgrading is strongly recommended. At a minimum avoid the
"preconditions for a successful exploit" by disabling
password timeouts under Webmin->Configuration->Authentication.
The libgtop_daemon package is a GNOME
program which makes system information available remotely.
LWN reported the remotely exploitable format
string and buffer overflow vulnerabilities in that package
on December 6th.
On November 28th
disabling the libgtop_daemon on systems where it is running until
an update is available.
Many Linux systems do not run
libgtop by default, but applying the update is a good idea anyway.
This vulnerability impacts all major Linux vendors. It may
impact every Linux installation on Earth.
Updates are required to zlib and any
packages that were statically built with the zlib code.
(First LWN report: March 14).
LinuxSecurity
describes the vulnerability and coordinated distributor efforts
in detail.
"Packages including X11, rsync, the Linux kernel, QT, mozilla, gcc,
vnc, and many other programs that have the ability to use network
compression are potentially vulnerable."
Updating is recommended.
As always, please proceed with caution when applying updates to
the kernel.
The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) issued their CERT
quaterly summary
"to draw attention to the types of attacks reported to our
incident response team, as well as other noteworthy incident and
vulnerability information."
Fenris 0.06
has been released by Michal Zalewski.
"This release brings you much improved debugging capabilities, from a
console-based debugging GUI [...], to
core functionality fixes, anti-debugger techniques detection, better
performance, or an updated write-up on debugging burneye-protected code."
For additional security-related events, included training courses (which we
don't list above) and events further in the future, check out
Security Focus' calendar,
one of the primary resources we use for building the above list. To
submit an event directly to us, please send a plain-text message to
lwn@lwn.net.
