[Bind version 9, the bind9 package, is not affected by these problems.]
ISS X-Force has discovered several serious vulnerabilities in the Berkeley Internet Name Domain Server (BIND). BIND is the most common implementation of the DNS (Domain Name Service) protocol, which is used on the vast majority of DNS servers on the Internet. DNS is a vital Internet protocol that maintains a database of easy-to-remember domain names (host names) and their corresponding numerical IP addresses.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), maintainers of BIND, was made aware of these issues in mid-October. Distributors of Open Source operating systems, including Debian, were notified of these vulnerabilities via CERT about 12 hours before the release of the advisories on November 12th. This notification did not include any details that allowed us to identify the vulnerable code, much less prepare timely fixes.
Unfortunately ISS and the ISC released their security advisories with only descriptions of the vulnerabilities, without any patches. Even though there were no signs that these exploits are known to the black-hat community, and there were no reports of active attacks, such attacks could have been developed in the meantime - with no fixes available.
We can all express our regret at the inability of the ironically named Internet Software Consortium to work with the Internet community in handling this problem. Hopefully this will not become a model for dealing with security issues in the future.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) project identified the following vulnerabilities:
These problems have been fixed in version 8.3.3-2.0woody1 for the current stable distribution (woody), in version 8.2.3-0.potato.3 for the previous stable distribution (potato) and in version 8.3.3-3 for the unstable distribution (sid). The fixed packages for unstable will enter the archive today.
We recommend that you upgrade your bind package immediately, update to bind9, or switch to another DNS server implementation.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.