GLSA 200701-13: Fetchmail: Denial of Service and password disclosure

Severity:normal
Title:Fetchmail: Denial of Service and password disclosure
Date:01/22/2007
Bugs: #160463
ID:200701-13

Synopsis

Fetchmail has been found to have numerous vulnerabilities allowing for Denial of Service and password disclosure.

Background

Fetchmail is a remote mail retrieval and forwarding utility.

Affected packages

Package Vulnerable Unaffected Architecture(s)
net-mail/fetchmail < 6.3.6 >= 6.3.6 All supported architectures

Description

Neil Hoggarth has discovered that when delivering messages to a message delivery agent by means of the "mda" option, Fetchmail passes a NULL pointer to the ferror() and fflush() functions when refusing a message. Isaac Wilcox has discovered numerous means of plain-text password disclosure due to errors in secure connection establishment.

Impact

An attacker could deliver a message via Fetchmail to a message delivery agent configured to refuse the message, and crash the Fetchmail process. SMTP and LMTP delivery modes are not affected by this vulnerability. An attacker could also perform a Man-in-the-Middle attack, and obtain plain-text authentication credentials of users connecting to a Fetchmail process.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All fetchmail users should upgrade to the latest version:

    # emerge --sync
    # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=net-mail/fetchmail-6.3.6"

References

Availability

This GLSA and any updates to it are available for viewing at the Gentoo Security Website: http://security.gentoo.org/glsa/glsa-200701-13.xml

Concerns?

Security is a primary focus of Gentoo Linux and ensuring the confidentiality and security of our users machines is of utmost importance to us. Any security concerns should be addressed to security@gentoo.org or alternatively, you may file a bug at https://bugs.gentoo.org.

License

Copyright 2010 Gentoo Foundation, Inc; referenced text belongs to its owner(s). The contents of this document are licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution / Share Alike license.

Thank you!