-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- ============================================================================= FreeBSD-SA-02:05 Security Advisory FreeBSD, Inc. Topic: pine port insecure URL handling [REVISED] Category: ports Module: pine Announced: 2002-01-04 Revised: 2002-01-10 Credits: zen-parse Affects: Ports collection prior to the correction date Corrected: 2002-01-10 16:47:18 UTC FreeBSD only: NO 0. Revision History v1.0 2002-01-04 Initial release. v1.1 2002-01-10 Corrected vulnerable versions and the `Corrected details' section. I. Background PINE is an application for reading mail and news. II. Problem Description The pine port, versions previous to pine-4.44, handles URLs in messages insecurely. PINE allows users to launch a web browser to visit a URL embedded in a message. Due to a programming error, PINE does not properly escape meta-characters in the URL before passing it to the command shell as an argument to the web browser. The pine port is not installed by default, nor is it "part of FreeBSD" as such: it is part 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 can supply commands enclosed in single quotes ('') in a URL embedded in a message sent to the victim. If the user then decides to view the URL, PINE will launch a command shell which will then execute the attacker's commands with the victim's privileges. It is possible to obfuscate the URL so that it will not necessarily seem dangerous to the victim. IV. Workaround 1) Deinstall the pine port/package if you have it installed. V. Solution 1) Upgrade your entire ports collection and rebuild the port. 2) Deinstall the old package and install a new package dated after the correction date, obtained from the following directories: [i386] ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/mail/pine-4.44.tgz ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5-current/mail/pine-4.44.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 pine 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 Ports Collection since 4.4-RELEASE. Path Revision - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ports/mail/pine4/Makefile 1.61 ports/mail/pine4/distinfo 1.20 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-aa 1.4 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-ac 1.11 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-af 1.12 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-ai 1.11 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-aj 1.5 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-ak 1.6 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-al 1.11 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-am 1.6 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-an 1.5 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-ap 1.3 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-at 1.6 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-au 1.4 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-ax 1.5 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-az 1.3 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-be 1.1 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-bf 1.1 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-bg 1.1 ports/mail/pine4/files/patch-reply.c 1.2 - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (FreeBSD) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iQCVAwUBPD3LZlUuHi5z0oilAQH6EAP/bz0Yeydx2zCmQb0j4zmbKM5R8McyKaYb tl/Vo/ViCll6xKXUuAOjFpyIkQMOmHGLwHXmqjJD+XRb0hSgrsCqRmWhUicppZjH dY0zjvtKspbDN37ScOO+MJmGsmq1mfZGs8JUMCbYivDuLhRM/5bvnenUsigNUaQW hkwKI6heurk= =BQ0F -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----