Linux Advisory Watch – June 13th, 2003

By
-
18
– by Benjamin D.
Thomas –

This week, advisories were released for the Linux kernel, eterm,
xaos, ethereal, atftp, gnocatan, nethack, slashem, cupsys, mod_php, zlib, kon2,
gzip, KDE, hanterm, pptpd, cups, and lv. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo,
Immunix, Mandrake, OpenPKG, RedHat, SuSE, Turbolinux, and Yellow Dog.

Last week, I discussed how HIPAA should be viewed as a step in
the right direction, rather than a burden for U.S. healthcare companies. I received
a lot of positive feedback from readers who are happy that they now have an
adequate budget to address security problems. This week, I wanted to take a
look at BS7799 and ISO17799. BS7799 was first developed by the UK Department
of Trade and Industry’s (DTI) Commercial Computer Security Centre (CCSC) and
prepared by the British Standards Institution with the goal of developing a
set of security management standards that can be used across many industries.
Soon after establishing the BS7799, it was submitted to the International Organization
for Standardization (ISO). After several revisions, BS7799 was accepted and
used as a basis for ISO17799.

What is the goal of BS7799 & ISO17799? Each were created with
the specific purpose of providing an established starting point for organizations
to develop an information security program. Similar to HIPAA, the ‘7799’ standards
intend to help an organization maintain strict data confidentiality, integrity,
and availability. The standards and recommendations are written with upper information
security management as an intended audience. What makes up the standards? Each
standard outlines organizations security issues, asset classification, personnel
security, security policy, physical and operational security, access control,
systems development, business continuity management, and standards compliance.

Organizations have many reasons for wanting to comply with international
standards. Although one could argue the case that ‘7799’ is incomplete, it does
accomplish its goals. These standards provide the basic building blocks for
constructing an information security program in your organization.

Until next time,
Benjamin D. Thomas

LinuxSecurity Feature Extras:

Real-Time
Alerting with Snort – Real-time alerting is a feature of an IDS or any
other monitoring application that notifies a person of an event in an acceptably
short amount of time. The amount of time that is acceptable is different for
every person.

Intrusion
Detection Systems: An Introduction
Intrusion Detection is the process and methodology of inspecting data for
malicious, inaccurate or anomalous activity. At the most basic levels there
are two forms of Intrusion Detection Systems that you will encounter: Host
and Network based.

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Distribution: Debian
  6/9/2003 kernel
    Multiple vulnerabilities

A number of vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/debian_advisory-3340.html
 
  6/6/2003 eterm
    Buffer overflow vulnerability

A number of vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/debian_advisory-3341.html
 
  6/8/2003 xaos
    Improper setuid-root execution

A number of vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/debian_advisory-3342.html
 
  6/11/2003 ‘ethereal’ buffer/integer overflows
    Improper setuid-root execution

Timo Sirainen discovered several vulnerabilities in ethereal, a network
traffic analyzer. These include one-byte buffer overflows in the AIM, GIOP
Gryphon, OSPF, PPTP, Quake, Quake2, Quake3, Rsync, SMB, SMPP, and TSP dissectors,
and integer overflows in the Mount and PPP dissectors.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/debian_advisory-3349.html
 
  6/11/2003 ‘atftp’ buffer overflow
    Improper setuid-root execution

Rick Patel discovered that atftpd is vulnerable to a buffer overflow when
a long filename is sent to the server. An attacker could exploit this bug
remotely to execute arbitrary code on the server.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/debian_advisory-3350.html
 
  6/11/2003 ‘gnocatan’ buffer overflows, DoS
    Improper setuid-root execution

Bas Wijnen discovered that the gnocatan server is vulnerable to several
buffer overflows which could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on the
server system

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/debian_advisory-3351.html
 
  6/11/2003 ‘nethack’ buffer overflow
    Improper setuid-root execution

The nethack package is vulnerable to a buffer overflow exploited via a long
‘-s’ command line option. This vulnerability could be used by an attacker
to gain gid ‘games’ on a system where nethack is installed.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/debian_advisory-3352.html
 
  6/12/2003 buffer overflow in ‘slashem
    The slashem package is vulnerable to a buffer overflow exploited
via a long ‘-s’ command line option. This vulnerability could be used by
an attacker to gain gid ‘games’ on a system where slashem is installed.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/debian_advisory-3353.html
 
  6/12/2003 ‘cupsys’ DoS
    overflow in ‘slashem’

The CUPS print server in Debian is vulnerable to a denial of service when
an HTTP request is received without being properly terminated.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/debian_advisory-3354.html
 
 
Distribution: Gentoo
  6/8/2003 mod_php
    Integer overflow vulnerability

Integer overflows have been fixed in several php functions.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/gentoo_advisory-3338.html
 
  6/8/2003 atftp
    Buffer overflow vulnerability

A buffer overflow has been fixed in atftp.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/gentoo_advisory-3339.html
 
 
Distribution: Immunix
  6/6/2003 zlib
    buffer overflow vulnerability

Richard Kettlewell has discovered a buffer overflow in zlib’s gzprintf()
function, which provides printf(3)-like functionality for compressed files.
This update, includs a patch from the OpenPKG project, fixes this problem
by enabling autoconf tests for vsnprintf(3).

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/immunix_advisory-3330.html
 
  6/9/2003 tetex, psutils, w3c-libwww
    buffer overflow vulnerability

Richard Kettlewell has discovered a buffer overflow in zlib’s gzprintf()
function, which provides printf(3)-like functionality for compressed files.
This update, includs a patch from the OpenPKG project, fixes this problem
by enabling autoconf tests for vsnprintf(3).

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/immunix_advisory-3344.html
 
 
Distribution: Mandrake
  6/6/2003 kon2
    buffer overflow vulnerability

A buffer overflow in the command line parsing can be exploited, leading
to local users being able to gain root privileges.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/mandrake_advisory-3329.html
 
  6/11/2003 several
    ‘kernel’ vulnerabilities

Multiple vulnerabilities were discovered and fixed in the Linux kernel.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/mandrake_advisory-3348.html
 
 
 
 
Distribution: OpenPKG
  6/11/2003 ‘gzip’ symlink attack
    info leak

The GNU Bash based znew(1) shell script tried to prevent itself from overwriting
existing files on shell redirection by using the POSIX “noclobber” shell
option, but accidentally forgot to check for the results, and in case of
existing files, stop further processing. This allowed a classical “symlink”
attack.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/other_advisory-3347.html
 
 
Distribution: RedHat
  6/6/2003 KDE
    ssl man-in-the-middle attack

Updated KDE packages that resolve a vulnerability in KDE’s SSL implementation
are now available.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/redhat_advisory-3331.html
 
  6/6/2003 hanterm
    multiple vulnerabilities

Updated hanterm packages fix two security issues.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/redhat_advisory-3332.html
 
  6/6/2003 kernel
    advisory updates

We have retracted two bug fix advisories that affected only the S/390 architecture
of Red Hat Linux 7.2.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/redhat_advisory-3333.html
 
 
Distribution: SuSE
  6/6/2003 pptpd
    Remote buffer overflow vulnerability

We have retracted two bug fix advisories that affected only the S/390 architecture
of Red Hat Linux 7.2.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/suse_advisory-3334.html
 
  6/6/2003 cups
    Remote DoS vulnerability

We have retracted two bug fix advisories that affected only the S/390 architecture
of Red Hat Linux 7.2.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/suse_advisory-3335.html
 
 
Distribution: Turbolinux
  6/6/2003 lv
    Privilege escalation vulnerability

An attackers may be able to gain the privileges of the user invoking lv.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/turbolinux_advisory-3336.html
 
  6/6/2003 kdelibs
    Privilege escalation vulnerability

An attackers may be able to gain the privileges of the user invoking lv.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/turbolinux_advisory-3337.html
 
 
Distribution: Yellow Dog
  6/10/2003 ‘ghostscript’ vulnerability
    Privilege escalation vulnerability

A flaw in unpatched versions of Ghostscript before 7.07 allows malicious
postscript files to execute arbitrary commands even with -dSAFER enabled.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/yellowdog_advisory-3345.html
 
  6/10/2003 ‘hanterm-xf’ vulnerabilities
    Privilege escalation vulnerability

An attacker can craft an escape sequence that sets the window title of a
victim using Hangul Terminal to an arbitrary command and then report it
to the command line.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/yellowdog_advisory-3346.html
 

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