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The ncurses library is used by many text/console based applications such as mail user agents, ftp clients and other command line utilities. A vulnerability has been found by Jouko Pynnönen <jouko@solutions.fi> in the screen handling functions: Insufficient boundary checking leads to a buffer overflow if a user supplies a specially drafted terminfo database file. If an ncurses-linked binary is installed setuid root, it is possible for a local attacker to exploit this hole and gain elevated privileges.

Updated cyrus-sasl packages are now available for Red Hat Linux 7.

A local /tmp bug in the /usr/sbin/ppp-off program was found. This bug could allow a local user to corrupt system files. A fix has been made and an updated package is now available in the -current branch.

A root exploit has been found in xlockmore packaged with Slackware. By providing a carefully crafted display variable to xlock, it is possible for a local attacker to gain root access. Anyone running xlock on a public machine should upgrade to this version of xlock (or disable xlock altogether) immediately.

Updated apache, php, mod_perl, and auth_ldap packages are now available for Red Hat Linux 5.2, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, and 7.

ypbind as shipped in Red Hat Linux 5.x and 6.x is vulnerable to a local root exploit. All systems making use of NIS services are encouraged to upgrade.

Updated gnupg packages are now available for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7.

Security problems have been found in the client code of the NIS (Network Information System, aka yp - yellow pages) subsytem. SuSE distributions before SuSE-6.1 came with the original ypbind program, SuSE-6.2 and later included the ypbind-mt NIS client implementation. ypbind-3.3 (the earlier version) has a format string parsing bug if it is run in debug mode, and (discovered by Olaf Kirch <okir@caldera.de>) leaks file descriptors under certain circumstances which can lead to a DoS. In addition, ypbind-3.3 may suffer from buffer overflows. ypbind-mt, the software shipped with SuSE distributions starting with SuSE-6.2, suffers from a single format string parsing bug. Some of these bugs could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code as root. During code audit and testing it turned out that the ypbind-3.x software in the SuSE-6.1 distribution and earlier needs a major overhaul to make it work both reliable and secure with respect to errors in the code. Basically, this is what happened when Thorsten Kukuk <kukuk@suse.de> wrote ypbind-mt from scratch in 1998. For the same reason, we are currently unable to produce a working security update package which fixes the known and yet unknown (there may be more) problems in the ypclient packages in the SuSE-6.1 distribution and older. The only efficient workaround for the SuSE-6.1 distribution and older against these bugs for an untrusted, hostile environment is to upgrade to a new distribution base (SuSE-7.0 is recommended) and use the ypclient update packages for this distribution. As of today, there is no exploit known to exist in the wild.

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Several security problems have been found in the Apache web server software. It is recommended that all users of Apache upgrade to the latest stable release to fix these problems.

The security problem in the traceroute program as shipped with SuSE Linux distributions is completely different from the one reported on security mailing lists a few days ago (`traceroute -g 1 -g 1') by Pekka Savola <pekkas@netcore.fi>. SuSE distributions do not contain this particular traceroute implementation. The problem in our traceroute was discovered independently and reported to us by H D Moore <hdm@secureaustin.com>. The problem in the implementation of traceroute that we ship is a format string parsing bug in a routine that can be used to terminate a line in traceroute's output to easily embed the program in cgi scripts as used for web frontends for traceroute. Using a specially crafted sequence of characters on the commandline, it is possile to trick the traceroute program into running arbitrary code as root.

gnorpm is a graphical user interface to the rpm subsystem for the gnome desktop.

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In versions of the PHP 4 packages before version 4.0.3, several format string bugs could allow properly crafted requests to execute code as the user running PHP scripts on the web server.

In versions of the PHP 3 packages before version 3.0.17, several format string bugs could allow properly crafted requests to execute code as the user running PHP scripts on the web server, particularly if error logging was enabled.

The version of nis as distributed in Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 and 2.2 contains an ypbind package with a security problem.

The first release of this advisory listed a wrongly compiled curl package for i386; this has been replaced with version 6.0-1.1.1 .

The version of curl as distributed with Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 had a bug in the error logging code: when it created an error message it failed to check the size of the buffer allocated for storing the message. This could be exploited by the remote machine by returning an invalid response to a request from curl which overflows the error buffer and trick curl into executing arbitrary code.

In versions of the traceroute package before 1.4a5-3, it is possible for a local user to gain root access by exploiting an argument parsing error.