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Daniel Kobras has discovered and fixed a problem in sendfiled which caused the daemon not to drop privileges as expected when sendnig notification mails. Exploiting this a local user can easily make it execute arbitrary code under root privileges.

Florian Wesch has discovered a problem (reported to bugtraq) with the way how Netscape handles comments in GIF files. The Netscape browser does not escape the GIF file comment in the image information page. This allows javascript execution in the "about:" protocol and can for example be used to upload the History (about:global) to a webserver, thus leaking private information. This problem has been fixed upstream in Netscape 4.77. Since we haven't received sourcecode for these packages they are not part of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution but are packaged up as `.deb' files for a convenient installation.

Updated mgetty packages are now available for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7.x. These packages fix packaging errors present in previous versions.

The HylaFax program hfaxd(8c) implements the server part of the HylaFax package. It is started either by inetd(8) or runs in standalone mode. hfaxd(8c) offers three different protocols to process fax jobs. When hfaxd(8c) tries to change to it's queue directory and fails, it prints an error message via syslog by directly passing user supplied data as format string. As long as hfaxd(8c) is installed setuid root, this behavior could be exploited to gain root access locally.

Colin Phipps and Daniel Kobras discovered and fixed several serious bugs in the saft daemon `sendfiled' which caused it to drop privileges incorrectly. Exploiting this a local user can easily make it execute arbitrary code under root privileges.

A security hole has been found that does not affect the default configuration of Red Hat Linux, but can affect some custom configurations of Red Hat Linux 7.1 only. The bug is specific to the Linux

The Nirvana Editor, NEdit, is a GUI-style text editor based on popular Macintosh and MS Windows editors. When printing a whole text or selected parts of a text, nedit(1) creates a temporary file in an insecure manner. This behavior could be exploited to gain access to other users privileges, even root.

The setuid application sudo(8) allows a user to execute commands under the privileges of another user (including root). sudo(8) previous to version 1.6.3p6 is vulnerable by a buffer overflow in it's logging code, which could lead to local root compromise.

The updated exuberant-ctags that was mentioned in DSA-046-1 was unfortunately compiled incorrectly: the stable chroot we used turned out to be running unstable instead.

The updated samba packages that were mentioned in DSA-048-1 were unfortunately compiled incorrectly: the stable chroot we used turned out to be running unstable instead.

Megyer Laszlo report on Bugtraq that the cfingerd Debian as distributed with Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 was not careful in its logging code. By combining this with an off-by-one error in the code that copied the username from an ident response cfingerd could exploited by a remote user. Since cfingerd does not drop its root privileges until after it has determined which user to finger an attacker can gain root privileges.

Marcus Meissner discovered that samba was not creating temporary files safely in two places:

2001-- Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq:RHAT - news), the leader in developing, deploying and managing open source solutions, announced today the availability of Red Hat Linux 7.1, the latest version of the world's most popular open source server operating environment. Red Hat Linux 7.1 includes the new 2.4 kernel with improved SMP support for superior performance on Intel multi-processor platforms. Red Hat Linux 7.1 also delivers new configuration tools that enable users to effortlessly set up and administer DNS, Web and print servers. This release features Red Hat Network connectivity, including software manager.

A local denial of service attack and root compromise of the kernel have been corrected, drivers have been updated, and NFS version 3 has been integrated.

New netscape packages are availabe to fix a problem with the handling of JavaScript in certain situations. By exploiting this flaw, a remote site could gain access to the browser history, and possibly other data. It is recommended that all users upgrade to the fixed packages. 2001-04-16: netscape-4.77-1 packages are now available for Red Hat Linux 7.1 for Intel.

The kernels used in Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 have been found to have multiple security problems. This is a list of problems based on the 2.2.19 release notes as found on http://www.linux.org.uk/ :

Colin Phipps discovered that the exuberant-ctags packages as distributed with Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 creates temporary files insecurely. This has been fixed in version 1:3.2.4-0.1 of the Debian package, and upstream version 3.5.

New netscape packages are availabe to fix a problem with the handling of JavaScript in certain situations. By exploiting this flaw, a remote site could gain access to the browser history, and possibly other data. It is recommended that all users upgrade to the fixed packages.

Updated pine packages are now available for Red Hat Linux 7.0, 6.2, and 5.

The text editor vim, Vi IMproved, was found vulnerable to two security bugs. 1.) a tmp race condition 2.) vim commands in regular files will be executed if the status line of vim is enabled in vimrc Both vulnerabilities could be used to gain unauthorized access to more privileges.