Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page All in one big page See also: last week's Security page. |
News and EditorialsHacking for the Common Good? (ZDNet). Lewis Z. Koch over at ZDNet discusses a supposed "white paper" from Rain Forest Puppy on how vendors and hackers finding vulnerabilities ought to interact. Note that we don't dispute the existence of the white paper -- though we find it annoying and irresponsible that ZDNet doesn't bother to provide a link to the paper they are discussing. The topic is just the same rules of the game that have been discussed on BugTraq many times -- act courteously, whether you have found a vulnerability to report or you are a vendor receiving a vulnerability report.
We actually found Alfred
Huger's recent comments on posting vulnerabilities more humorous
and a good reminder for novice and expert alike. Here is a portion
of his "rules":
Bar FTP and Telnet?. Simson L. Garfinkel recommended Universities bar the use of ftp and telnet, at a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania. "Mr. Garfinkel also urged the more than 300 residential-network managers and student-coordinators attending the conference to stop the common practice of using unencrypted passwords to secure network-user accounts. 'But you won't,' he chided. 'And so you're going to keep having accounts broken into.'" Security ReportsSSH 1.2.27+Kerberos vulnerability. It sounds like deja-vu: SSH 1.2.27 was originally released last year in response to a vulnerability present when SSH was compiled with Kerberos support enabled. Now Richard E. Silverman has reported another Kerberos-related vulnerability in 1.2.27. As a result, ssh 1.2.28 has hit the download sites and should contain a fix for the problem. Again, you are not affected if you are using ssh 1.2.27 compiled without Kerberos support, ssh 2.X or an alternate program, such as OpenSSH. imwheel. A vulnerability in imwheel were discussed in the April 27th Security Summary. This week, Red Hat published an updated version of their advisory, documenting multiple vulnerabilities in imwheel and recommending its removal under most circumstances. Here are the older imwheel advisories:
Debian Security Advisory - canna. The canna package as distributed in Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 can be remotely exploited to gain access. This has been fixed in version 3.5b2-24slink1, and they recommend that you upgrade your canna package immediately. makewhatis tmplink vulnerability. A tmplink vulnerability has been reported in makewhatis, part of the man package. This can be exploited to manipulate files without permission or elevate permissions locally. Check BugTraq ID 1434 for more details.This week's updates: vpopmail remote exploit vulnerability. vpopmail prior to version 4.8 can be remotely exploited to execute arbitrary code on a server. An advisory has been posted with details and information on upgrading to version 4.8. vpopmail is an extension to qmail for managing virtual domains and user accounts. Commercial products. The following commercial products were reported to contain vulnerabilities: Updateswu-ftpd. Check the June 15th Security Summary for a link to the mini-audit that turned up the latest set of problems with wu-ftpd.
ISC DHCP client. Check last week's Security Summary for more details. An upgrade to 2.0pl1 or 3.0b1pl14 should resolve the problem.
dump/restore. A security vulnerability in dump/restore has been fixed as of dump 0.4b18. Check the June 15th Security Summary for details. Netscape SSL. Problems in the manner that Netscape handled invalid SSL certificates have been fixed in Netscape 4.73. Check the May 18th Security Summary for the initial report. Also check the June 1st Security Summary for additional problems in Netscape 4.73. ResourcesWhite Paper: ICMP usage in scanning. Ofir Arkin has released a research paper entitled ICMP usage in scanning. "In this paper I have tried to outline what can be done with the ICMP protocol regarding scanning. The paper deals with plain Host Detection techniques, Host Detection techniques using ICMP error messages generated from probed hosts, Inverse Mapping, Trace routing, OS finger printing methods with ICMP, and which ICMP traffic should be filtered on a Filtering Device." EventsJuly/August security events.
Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
July 6, 2000
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