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Tatsuya Kinoshita discovered that IM, which contains interface commands and Perl libraries for E-mail and NetNews, creates temporary files insecurely.

Al Viro discovered a vulnerability in the WindowMaker window manager. A function used to load images, for example when configuring a new background image or previewing themes, contains a buffer overflow. The function calculates the amount of memory necessary to load the image by doing some multiplication but does not check the results of this multiplication, which may not fit into the destination variable, resulting in a buffer overflow when the image is loaded.

A vulnerability was discovered in pine while parsing and escaping characters of email addresses; not enough memory is allocated for storing the escaped mailbox part of the address. The resulting buffer overflow on the heap makes pine crash. This new version of pine, 4.50, has the vulnerability fixed. It also offers many other bug fixes and new features.

Xinetd contains a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability. UPDATE 2002-12-02: Updated packages are available to fix issues encountered with the previous errata packages.

Bindview discovered a problem in several IPSEC implementations that do not properly handle certain very short packets. IPSEC is a set of security extensions to IP which provide authentication and encryption. Free/SWan in Debain is affected by this and is said to cause a kernel panic.

A vulnerability was discovered by zen-parse and Pedram Amini in the sendmail MTA. They found two ways to exploit smrsh, an application intended as a replacement for the sh shell for use with sendmail; the first by inserting specially formatted commands in the ~/.forward file and secondly by calling smrsh directly with special options. These can be exploited to give users with no shell account, or those not permitted to execute certain programs or commands, the ability to bypass these restrictions.

A vulnerability was discovered in python by Zack Weinberg in the way that the execvpe() method from the os.py module uses a temporary file name. The file is created in an unsafe manner and execvpe() tries to execute it, which can be used by a local attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privilege of the user running the python code that is using this method.

A vulnerability in samba versions 2.2.2 through 2.2.6 was discovered by the Debian samba maintainers. A bug in the length checking for encrypted password change requests from clients could be exploited using a buffer overrun attack on the smbd stack. This attack would have to crafted in such a way that converting a DOS codepage string to little endian UCS2 unicode would translate into an executable block of code.

The kernel in Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7 is vulnerable to a local denial of service attack.

Pine, Program for Internet News and Email, is a well known and widely used eMail client. While parsing and escaping characters of eMail addresses pine does not allocate enough memory for storing the escaped mailbox part of an address. This results in a buffer overflow on the heap that will make pine crash. The offending eMail can just be deleted manually or by using another mail user agent.

Steve Langasek found an exploitable bug in the password handling code in samba: when converting from DOS code-page to little endian UCS2 unicode a buffer length was not checked and a buffer could be overflowed. There is no known exploit for this, but an upgrade is strongly recommended.

New samba packages are available that fix a security vulnerability present in samba versions

Around 08:00 CET on November 20th, the University of Twente Network Operations Center (NOC) caught fire. The building has burnt to the ground. The fire department has given up every hope on protecting the server area. Among other things the NOC hosted satie.debian.org which contained the security archive for the Debian distribution.

The SuSE security team discovered two vulnerabilities in the KDE lanbrowsing service during an audit. The LISa network daemon and "reslisa", a restricted version of LISa are used to identify servers on the local network by using the URL type "lan://" and "rlan://" respectively. A buffer overflow was discovered in the lisa daemon that can be exploited by an attacker on the local network to obtain root privilege on a machine running the lisa daemon. Another buffer overflow was found in the lan:// URL handler, which can be exploited by a remote attacker to gain access to the victim user's account.

Vulnerabilities were discovered in the KIO subsystem support for various network protocols. The implementation of the rlogin protocol affects all KDE versions from 2.1 up to 3.0.4, while the flawed implementation of the telnet protocol only affects KDE 2.x. They allow a carefully crafted URL in an HTML page, HTML email, or other KIO-enabled application to execute arbitrary commands as the victim with their privilege.

Samba developer Steve Langasek found a security problem in samba, the widely known free implementation of the SMB protocol.

Steven Christey discovered a cross site scripting vulnerability in mhonarc, a mail to HTML converter. Carefully crafted message headers can introduce cross site scripting when mhonarc is configured to display all headers lines on the web. However, it is often useful to restrict the displayed header lines to To, From and Subject, in which case the vulnerability cannot be exploited.

A problem has been discovered in nullmailer, a simple relay-only mail transport agent for hosts that relay mail to a fixed set of smart relays. When a mail is to be delivered locally to a user that doesn't exist, nullmailer tries to deliver it, discovers a user unknown error and stops delivering. Unfortunately, it stops delivering entirely, not only this mail. Hence, it's very easy to craft a denial of service.

The kernel in Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.1K, 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0 are vulnerable to a local denial of service attack. Updated packages are available which address this vulnerability, as well as bugs in several drivers.

A problem in the Courier sqwebmail package, a CGI program to grant authenticated access to local mailboxes, has been discovered. The program did not drop permissions fast enough upon startup under certain circumstances so a local shell user can execute the sqwebmail binary and manage to read an arbitrary file on the local filesystem.