Debian: DSA 337-1 Moderate: Insecure File Management in Semi and Wemi

debian

July 7, 2003

semi, a MIME library for GNU Emacs, does not take appropriate security precautions when creating temporary files.

Topics Covered

security advisory debian local issue semi package insecure file wemi package

Summary

semi, a MIME library for GNU Emacs, does not take appropriate
security precautions when creating temporary files. This bug could
potentially be exploited to overwrite arbitrary files with the
privileges of the user running Emacs and semi, potentially with
contents supplied by the attacker.

wemi is a fork of semi, and contains the same bug.

For the stable distribution (woody) this problem has been fixed in
semi version 1.14.3.cvs.2001.08.10-1woody2 and wemi version
1.14.0.20010802wemiko-1.3.

For the unstable distribution (sid) this problem has been fixed in
semi version 1.14.5+20030609-1. The unstable distribution does not
contain a wemi package.

We recommend that you update your semi and wemi packages.

Upgrade Instructions
- --------------------

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

If you are using the apt-get package manager, use the line for
sources.list as given below:

apt-get update
will update the internal database
apt-get u...