Debian: DSA 377-1 Moderate: Wu-ftpd Remote Execution Risk

debian

September 5, 2003

wu-ftpd, an FTP server, implements a feature whereby multiple filescan be fetched in the form of a dynamically constructed archive file,such as a tar archive

Topics Covered

security advisory Debian exploit remote execution wu-ftpd program execution tar issue

Summary

wu-ftpd, an FTP server, implements a feature whereby multiple files
can be fetched in the form of a dynamically constructed archive file,
such as a tar archive. The names of the files to be included are
passed as command line arguments to tar, without protection against
them being interpreted as command-line options. GNU tar supports
several command line options which can be abused, by means of this
vulnerability, to execute arbitrary programs with the privileges of
the wu-ftpd process.

Georgi Guninski pointed out that this vulnerability exists in Debian
woody.

For the stable distribution (woody) this problem has been fixed in
version 2.6.2-3woody2.

For the unstable distribution (sid) this problem will be fixed soon.

We recommend that you update your wu-ftpd package.

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:

a...