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Linux Advisory Watch: August 29th, 2008
Source: LinuxSecurity.com Contributors - Posted by Benjamin D. Thomas
This week, advisories were released for libxml2, tiff, metisse, xine-lib, openoffice, tomcat, ipsec-tools, openssh, yelp, and the Linux kernel. The distributors include Debian, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.
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Feature Extras:
Review: Hacking Exposed Linux, Third Edition - "Hacking Exposed Linux" by ISECOM (Institute for Security and Open Methodologies) is a guide to help you secure your Linux environment. This book does not only help improve your security it looks at why you should. It does this by showing examples of real attacks and rates the importance of protecting yourself from being a victim of each type of attack.
Security Features of Firefox 3.0 - Lets take a look at the security features of the newly released Firefox 3.0. Since it's release on Tuesday I have been testing it out to see how the new security enhancements work and help in increase user browsing security. One of the exciting improvements for me was how Firefox handles SSL secured web sites while browsing the Internet. There are also many other security features that this article will look at. For example, improved plugin and addon security.
Read on for more security features of Firefox 3.0.
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weekly security newsletter. The purpose of this document is to provide our readers
with a quick summary of each week's most relevant Linux security headline.
EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.20 Now Available (Aug 19)
Guardian Digital is happy to announce the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.20 (Version 3.0, Release 20). This release includes many updated packages and bug fixes and some feature enhancements to the EnGarde Secure Linux Installer and the SELinux policy.
In distribution since 2001, EnGarde Secure Community was one of the very first security platforms developed entirely from open source, and has been engineered from the ground-up to provide users and organizations with complete, secure Web functionality, DNS, database, e-mail security and even e-commerce.
Debian: New libxml2 packages fix denial of service (Aug 26)
The previous security update of the libxml2 package introduced some problems with other packages, most notably with librsvg. This update corrects these problems whilst still fixing the reported scurity problem.
Debian: New tiff packages fix arbitrary code execution (Aug 26)
Drew Yao discovered that libTIFF, a library for handling the Tagged Image File Format, is vulnerable to a programming error allowing malformed tiff files to lead to a crash or execution of arbitrary code.
Debian: New libxml2 packages fix denial of service (Aug 22)
Andreas Solberg discovered that libxml2, the GNOME XML library, could be forced to recursively evaluate entities, until available CPU & memory resources were exhausted.
Debian: New Linux 2.6.18 packages fix several vulnerabilities (Aug 21)
Dirk Nehring discovered a vulnerability in the IPsec code that allows remote users to cause a denial of service by sending a specially crafted ESP packet.
Andreas Solberg found a denial of service flaw in how libxml2 processed certain content. If an application linked against libxml2 processed such malformed XML content, it could cause the application to stop responding (CVE-2008-3281).
Andreas Solberg found a denial of service flaw in how libxml2 processed certain content. If an application linked against libxml2 processed such malformed XML content, it could cause the application to stop responding (CVE-2008-3281). The updated packages have been patched to prevent this issue.
An input validation flaw was found in X.org's MIT-SHM extension. A client connected to the X.org server could read arbitrary server memory, resulting in the disclosure of sensitive data of other users of the X.org server (CVE-2008-1379).
Alin Rad Pop found an array index vulnerability in the SDP parser of xine-lib. If a user or automated system were tricked into opening a malicious RTSP stream, a remote attacker could possibly execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user using the program (CVE-2008-0073).
Updated openoffice.org packages that fix a security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. A numeric truncation error was found in the OpenOffice.org memory allocator. If a carefully crafted file was opened by a victim, an attacker could use this flaw to crash OpenOffice.org or, possibly, execute arbitrary code. This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.
Updated tomcat packages that fix several security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. A cross-site scripting vulnerability was discovered in the HttpServletResponse.sendError() method. A remote attacker could inject arbitrary web script or HTML via forged HTTP headers. This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.
An updated ipsec-tools package that fixes two security issues is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, and 5. Two denial of service flaws were found in the ipsec-tools racoon daemon. It was possible for a remote attacker to cause the racoon daemon to consume all available memory. This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.
RedHat: Important: kernel security and bug fix update (Aug 26)
Updated kernel packages that fix several security issues and several bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.0. The possibility of a timeout value overflow was found in the Linux kernel high-resolution timers functionality, hrtimer. This could allow a local unprivileged user to execute arbitrary code, or cause a denial of service (kernel panic). This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.
These packages also fix a low severity flaw in the way ssh handles X11 cookies when creating X11 forwarding connections. When ssh was unable to create untrusted cookie, ssh used a trusted cookie instead, possibly allowing the administrative user of a untrusted remote server, or untrusted application run on the remote server, to gain unintended access to a users local X server
Updated libxml2 packages that fix a security issue are now available. This update has been rated as having moderate security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.
Aaron Grattafiori discovered that the Gnome Help Viewer did not handle format strings correctly when displaying certain error messages. If a user were tricked into opening a specially crafted URI, a remote attacker could execute arbitrary code with user privileges.
It was discovered that there were multiple NULL-pointer function dereferences in the Linux kernel terminal handling code. A local attacker could exploit this to execute arbitrary code as root, or crash the system, leading to a denial of service. (CVE-2008-2812)
