-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- ============================================================================= FreeBSD-SA-02:04 Security Advisory FreeBSD, Inc. Topic: mutt ports contain remotely exploitable buffer overflow [REVISED] Category: ports Module: mutt Announced: 2002-01-04 Revised: 2002-01-06 Credits: Joost Pol Affects: Ports collection prior to the correction date Corrected: 2002-01-02 13:52:03 UTC (ports/mail/mutt: 1.2.x) 2002-01-02 03:39:01 UTC (ports/mail/mutt-devel: 1.3.x) FreeBSD only: NO 0. Revision History v1.0 2002-01-04 Initial release v1.1 2002-01-06 Corrected typo in mutt port version. I. Background Mutt is a small but very powerful text-based mail client for Unix operating systems. II. Problem Description The mutt ports, versions prior to mutt-1.2.5_1 and mutt-devel-1.3.24_2, contain a buffer overflow in the handling of email addresses in headers. The mutt and mutt-devel ports are not installed by default, nor are they "part of FreeBSD" as such: they are parts of the FreeBSD ports collection, which contains over 6000 third-party applications in a ready-to-install format. The ports collection shipped with FreeBSD 4.4 contains this problem since it was discovered after the release. FreeBSD makes no claim about the security of these third-party applications, although an effort is underway to provide a security audit of the most security-critical ports. III. Impact An attacker may send an email message with a specially crafted email address in any of several message headers to the victim. When the victim reads the message using mutt and encounters that email address, the buffer overflow is triggered and may result in arbitrary code being executed with the privileges of the victim. IV. Workaround 1) Deinstall the mutt and mutt-devel ports/packages if you have them installed. V. Solution 1) Upgrade your entire ports collection and rebuild the ports. 2) Deinstall the old packages and install news package dated after the correction date, obtained from the following directories: [i386] ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/mail/mutt-1.2.5_1.tgz ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/mail/mutt-devel-1.3.24_2.tgz ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5-current/mail/mutt-1.2.5_1.tgz ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5-current/mail/mutt-devel-1.3.24_2.tgz [alpha] Packages are not automatically generated for the alpha architecture at this time due to lack of build resources. NOTE: It may be several days before updated packages are available. 3) Download a new port skeleton for the mutt or mutt-devel port from: http://www.freebsd.org/ports/ and use it to rebuild the port. 4) Use the portcheckout utility to automate option (3) above. The portcheckout port is available in /usr/ports/devel/portcheckout or the package can be obtained from: ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/devel/portcheckout-2.0.tgz ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5-current/devel/portcheckout-2.0.tgz VI. Correction details The following list contains the $FreeBSD$ revision numbers of each file that was corrected in the FreeBSD source Path Revision - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ports/mail/mutt/Makefile 1.110 ports/mail/mutt/files/patch-rfc822.c 1.1 ports/mail/mutt-devel/Makefile 1.141 ports/mail/mutt-devel/files/patch-rfc822-security 1.1 - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- VII. References -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (FreeBSD) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iQCVAwUBPDiTdlUuHi5z0oilAQFUhwP9GrypvSZsDm4VXsvv0bTXMdgySDM6nR+f lTe+WtKuJu6unu/Befb5ep2Nb/nt4AzRZzwR/8b9amROk63eFa5fHe8RrwZa7aug 9BGGTOWtH+PKYrqB4BAGMBsEYPEleUyED4XTc/wrCrYGXigNTxgRKAeBmxe8UMO1 G7SzKi2sFYE= =dHuU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----