Security Information

Debian takes security very seriously. We handle all security problems brought to our attention and ensure that they are corrected within a reasonable timeframe. Many advisories are coordinated with other free software vendors and are published the same day a vulnerability is made public and we also have a Security Audit team that reviews the archive looking for new or unfixed security bugs.

Experience has shown that security through obscurity does not work. Public disclosure allows for more rapid and better solutions to security problems. In that vein, this page addresses Debian's status with respect to various known security holes, which could potentially affect Debian.

Debian also participates in security standardization efforts: the Debian Security Advisories are CVE-Compatible (review the cross references) and Debian is represented in the Board of the Open Vulnerability Assessment Language project.

Keeping your Debian system secure

In order to receive the latest Debian security advisories, subscribe to the debian-security-announce mailing list.

You can use apt to easily get the latest security updates. This requires a line such as

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free

in your /etc/apt/sources.list file. Then execute apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to download and apply the pending updates. The security archive is signed with the normal Debian archive signing keys.

For more information about security issues in Debian, please refer to the Security Team FAQ and a manual called Securing Debian.

Recent Advisories

These web pages include a condensed archive of security advisories posted to the debian-security-announce list.

[02 May 2013] DSA-2664 stunnel4 - buffer overflow
[30 Apr 2013] DSA-2665 strongswan - authentication bypass
[22 Apr 2013] DSA-2663 tinc - stack based buffer overflow
[20 Apr 2013] DSA-2660 curl - exposure of sensitive information
[18 Apr 2013] DSA-2662 xen - several vulnerabilities
[17 Apr 2013] DSA-2661 xorg-server - information disclosure
[09 Apr 2013] DSA-2659 libapache-mod-security - XML external entity processing vulnerability
[04 Apr 2013] DSA-2658 postgresql-9.1 - several vulnerabilities
[04 Apr 2013] DSA-2657 postgresql-8.4 - guessable random numbers
[03 Apr 2013] DSA-2654 libxslt - denial of service

The latest Debian security advisories are also available in RDF format. We also offer a second file that includes the first paragraph of the corresponding advisory so you can see in it what the advisory is about.

The older security advisories are also available: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1997 and undated security advisories, included for posterity.

Debian distributions are not vulnerable to all security problems. The Debian Security Tracker collects all information about the vulnerability status of Debian packages, and can be searched by CVE name or by package.

Contact Information

Please read the Security Team FAQ before contacting us, your question may well be answered there already!

The contact information is in the FAQ as well.