A vulnerability has been discovered in NANOG traceroute, an enhanced version of the Van Jacobson/BSD traceroute program. A buffer overflow occurs in the 'get_origin()' function. Due to insufficient bounds checking performed by the whois parser, it may be possible to corrupt memory on the system stack. This vulnerability can be exploited by a remote attacker to gain root privileges on a target host. Though, most probably not in Debian.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) project additionally identified the following vulnerabilities which were already fixed in the Debian version in stable (woody) and oldstable (potato) and are mentioned here for completeness (and since other distributions had to release a separate advisory for them):
Fortunately, the Debian package drops privileges quite early after startup, so those problems are not likely to result in an exploit on a Debian machine.
For the current stable distribution (woody) the above problem has been fixed in version 6.1.1-1.2.
For the old stable distribution (potato) the above problem has been fixed in version 6.0-2.2.
For the unstable distribution (sid) these problems have been fixed in version 6.3.0-1.
We recommend that you upgrade your traceroute-nanog package.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.