Debian Security Advisory

DSA-044-1 mailx -- buffer overflow

Date Reported:

13 Mar 2001

Affected Packages:

mailx

Vulnerable:

Yes

Security database references:

In the Bugtraq database (at SecurityFocus): BugTraq ID 2457.

More information:

The mail program (a simple tool to read and send email) as distributed with Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 has a buffer overflow in the input parsing code. Since mail is installed setgid mail by default this allowed local users to use it to gain access to mail group.

Since the mail code was never written to be secure fixing it properly would mean a large rewrite. Instead of doing this we decided to no longer install it setgid. This means that it can no longer lock your mailbox properly on systems for which you need group mail to write to the mailspool, but it will still work for sending email.

This has been fixed in mailx version 8.1.1-10.1.5. If you have suidmanager installed you can also make this manually with the following command: suidregister /usr/bin/mail root root 0755

Fixed in:

Debian 2.2 (potato)

Source:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/source/mailx_8.1.1-10.1.5.diff.gz; http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/source/mailx_8.1.1-10.1.5.dsc; http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/source/mailx_8.1.1.orig.tar.gz
alpha:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-alpha/mailx_8.1.1-10.1.5_alpha.deb
arm:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-arm/mailx_8.1.1-10.1.5_arm.deb
i386:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-i386/mailx_8.1.1-10.1.5_i386.deb
m68k:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-m68k/mailx_8.1.1-10.1.5_m68k.deb
powerpc:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-powerpc/mailx_8.1.1-10.1.5_powerpc.deb
sparc:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-sparc/mailx_8.1.1-10.1.5_sparc.deb