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The following problems have been reported for the version of proftpd in Debian 2.2 (potato):

Styx has reported that the program `man' mistakenly passes malicious strings (i.e. containing format characters) through routines that were not meant to use them as format strings. Since this could cause a segmentation fault and privileges were not dropped it may lead to an exploit for the 'man' user.

This upload fixes:

Three security holes fixed in new kernel, and several other updates and bug fixes have been applied as well.

The XEmacs package as shipped with Red Hat PowerTools 6.2 has a security problem with gnuserv and gnuclient, due to a buffer overflow and weak security.

The XEmacs package as shipped with Red Hat Linux 7 has a security problem with gnuserv and gnuclient.

bind-8.x in all versions of the SuSE distributions contain a bug in the transaction signature handling code that can allow to remotely over- flow a buffer and thereby execute arbitrary code as the user running the nameserver (this is user named by default on SuSE systems). In addition to this bug, another problem allows for a remote attacker to collect information about the running bind process (this has been found by Claudio Musmarra <a9605121@unet.univie.ac.at>). For more information on these bugs, please visit the CERT webpage at http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2001-02.html and the bind bugs webpage at http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/bind-security.html .

The inetd server as shipped with Red Hat Linux 6.2 fails to close sockets for internal services properly.

kdesu is a KDE frontend for su(1). When invoked it prompts for the root password and runs su(1). kdesu itself does not run setuid/setgid.

Several security problems have been found in the bind 8.

BIND 8 suffered from several buffer overflows. It is possible to construct an inverse query that allows the stack to be read remotely exposing environment variables. CERT has disclosed information about these issues. A new upstream version fixes this. Due to the complexity of BIND we have decided to make an exception to our rule by releasin the new upstream source to our stable distribution.

Multiple vulnerabilities exist in the versions of BIND found in Slackware 7.1 and -current. Users of BIND 8.x are urged to upgrade to 8.2.3 to fix these problems. More information can be found on the BIND website:

A former security upload of OpenSSH was linked against the wrong version of libssl (providing an API to SSL), that version was not available on sparc. This ought to fix a former upload that lacked support for PAM which lead into people not being able to log in into their server. This was only a problem on the sparc architecture.

A former security upload of OpenSSH lacked support for PAM which lead into people not being able to log in into their server. This was only a problem on the sparc architecture.

The FreeBSD team has found a bug in the way new crontabs were handled which allowed malicious users to display arbitrary crontab files on the local system. This only affects valid crontab files so can't be used to get access to /etc/shadow or something. crontab files are not especially secure anyway, as there are other ways they can leak. No passwords or similar sensitive data should be in there.

1. People at WireX have found several potential insecure uses of temporary files in programs provided by INN2. Some of them only lead to a vulnerability to symlink attacks if the temporary directory was set to /tmp or /var/tmp, which is the case in many installations, at least in Debian packages. An attacker could overwrite any file owned by the news system administrator, i.e. owned by news.news.

Former versions of the exmh program used /tmp for storing temporary files. No checks were made to ensure that nobody placed a symlink with the same name in /tmp in the meantime and thus was vulnerable to a symlink attack. This could lead to a malicious local user being able to overwrite any file writable by the user executing exmh. Upstream developers have reported and fixed this. The exmh program now use /tmp/login now unless TMPDIR or EXMHTMPDIR is set.

ld-linux.so.2, the dynamical linker, adds shared libraries to the memoryspace of a program to be started. Its flexibility allows for some environment variables to influence the linking process such as preloading shared libraries as well as defining the path in which the linker will search for the shared libraries. Special care must be exercised when runtime-linking setuid- or setgid-binaries: The runtime-linker must not link against user-specified libraries since the code therein would then run with the elevated privileges of the suid binary. The runtime-linker as used in the SuSE distributions ignores the content of the critical environment variables if the specified path begins with a slash ("/"), or if the library file name is not cached (eg it is contained in a path from /etc/ld.so.conf). However, Solar Designer has found out that even preloading glibc- native shared libraries can be dangerous: The code in the user-linked library is not aware of the fact that the binary runs with suid or sgid privileges. Using debugging features of the glibc (and possibly other features) it is possible for a local attacker to overwrite arbitrary files with the elevated privileges of the suid/sgid binary executed. This may lead to a local root compromise.

WireX have found some occurrences of insecure opening of temporary files in htdigest and htpasswd. Both programs are not installed setuid or setgid and thus the impact should be minimal. The Apache group has released another security bugfix which fixes a vulnerability in mod_rewrite which may result the remote attacker to access arbitrary files on the web server.

The Zend people have found a vulnerability in older versions of PHP4 (the original advisory speaks of 4.0.4 while the bugs are present in 4.0.3 as well). It is possible to specify PHP directives on a per-directory basis which leads to a remote attacker crafting an HTTP request that would cause the next page to be served with the wrong values for these directives. Also even if PHP is installed, it can be activated and deactivated on a per-directory or per-virtual host basis using the "engine=on" or "engine=off" directive. This setting can be leaked to other virtual hosts on the same machine, effectively disabling PHP for those hosts and resulting in PHP source code being sent to the client instead of being executed on the server.