Debian 2.2: DSA-044-1 Moderate Risk: Mailx Buffer Overflow

debian

March 13, 2001

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.

Topics Covered

security advisory buffer overflow Debian vulnerability moderate risk mailx email access

Summary

Package : mailx
Problem type : buffer overflow
Debian-specific: no

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

wget url
will fetch the file for you
dpkg -i file.deb
will install the referenced file.

Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 alias potato
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