Thank you for reading the Linux Advisory Watch Security Newsletter. The purpose of this document is to provide our readers with a quick summary of each week's vendor security bulletins and pointers on methods to improve the security posture of your open source system. Vulnerabilities affect nearly every vendor virtually every week, so be sure to read through to find the updates your distributor have made available.

LinuxSecurity.com Feature Extras:

Password guessing as an attack vector - Using password guessing as an attack vector. Over the years we've been taught a strong password must be long and complex to be considered secure. Some of us have taken that notion to heart and always ensure our passwords are strong. But some don't give a second thought to the complexity or length of our password.

Squid and Digest Authentication - Digest AuthenticationDigest Authentication hashes the password before transmitting over the wire. Essentially it sends a message digest generated from multiple items including username, realm and nonce value. If you want to know more see (RFC 2617).

(Dec 26)

It was discovered that the encryption support for BSD telnetd contains a pre-authentication buffer overflow, which may enable remote attackers who can connect to the Telnet port to execute arbitrary code with root privileges. [More...]
(Dec 26)

The information security group at ETH Zurich discovered a denial of service vulnerability in the crypto helper handler of the IKE daemon pluto. More information can be found in the upstream advisory at [More...]
(Dec 25)

It was discovered that the Kerberos support for telnetd contains a pre-authentication buffer overflow, which may enable remote attackers who can connect to the Telnet to execute arbitrary code with root privileges. [More...]
(Dec 25)

It was discovered that the Kerberos support for telnetd contains a pre-authentication buffer overflow, which may enable remote attackers who can connect to the Telnet to execute arbitrary code with root privileges. [More...]
(Dec 24)

Two buffer overflows were discovered in JasPer, a library for handling JPEG-2000 images, which could lead to the execution of arbitrary code. For the oldstable distribution (lenny), this problem will be fixed in [More...]
(Dec 22)

It was discovered that Unbound, a recursive DNS resolver, would crash when processing certain malformed DNS responses from authoritative DNS servers, leading to denial of service. [More...]
Mandriva: 2011:196: ipmitool (Dec 28)

A vulnerability has been discovered and corrected in ipmitool: ipmievd as used in the ipmitool package uses 0666 permissions for its ipmievd.pid PID file, which allows local users to kill arbitrary processes by writing to this file (CVE-2011-4339). [More...]
Mandriva: 2011:195: krb5-appl (Dec 28)

A vulnerability has been discovered and corrected in krb5-appl, heimdal and netkit-telnet: An unauthenticated remote attacker can cause a buffer overflow and probably execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the telnet [More...]
Mandriva: 2011:194: icu (Dec 27)

A vulnerability has been discovered and corrected in icu: A stack-based buffer overflow flaw was found in the way ICU performed variant canonicalization for some locale identifiers. If a specially-crafted locale representation was opened in an application [More...]
Mandriva: 2011:193: squid (Dec 27)

A vulnerability has been discovered and corrected in squid: The idnsGrokReply function in Squid before 3.1.16 does not properly free memory, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon abort) via a DNS reply containing a CNAME record [More...]
Mandriva: 2011:192: mozilla (Dec 23)

Security issues were identified and fixed in mozilla firefox and thunderbird: The SVG implementation in Mozilla Firefox 8.0, Thunderbird 8.0, and SeaMonkey 2.5 does not properly interact with DOMAttrModified event [More...]
Red Hat: 2011:1854-01: krb5-appl: Critical Advisory (Dec 28)

Updated krb5-appl packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and 6.1 Extended Update Support. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having critical [More...]
Red Hat: 2011:1853-01: krb5: Critical Advisory (Dec 28)

Updated krb5 packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Extended Life Cycle Support, 5.3 Long Life and 5.6 Extended Update Support [More...]
Red Hat: 2011:1852-02: krb5-appl: Critical Advisory (Dec 27)

Updated krb5-appl packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having [More...]
Red Hat: 2011:1851-01: krb5: Critical Advisory (Dec 27)

Updated krb5 packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having Critical [More...]
Red Hat: 2011:1849-01: kernel: Important Advisory (Dec 22)

Updated kernel packages that fix one security issue and various bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having [More...]
Ubuntu: 1254-1: Thunderbird vulnerabilities (Dec 22)

Multiple vulnerabilities have been fixed in Thunderbird.