Debian 9844 Published by

The following two MailX updates are available for Debian 6 LTS:

[DLA 113-1] bsd-mailx security update
[DLA 114-1] heirloom-mailx security update



[DLA 113-1] bsd-mailx security update

Package : bsd-mailx
Version : 8.1.2-0.20100314cvs-1+deb6u1
CVE ID : CVE-2014-7844

It was discovered that bsd-mailx, an implementation of the "mail"
command, had an undocumented feature which treats syntactically valid
email addresses as shell commands to execute.

Users who need this feature can re-enable it using the "expandaddr" in
an appropriate mailrc file. This update also removes the obsolete -T
option. An older security vulnerability, CVE-2004-2771, had already
been addressed in the Debian's bsd-mailx package.

Note that this security update does not remove all mailx facilities
for command execution, though. Scripts which send mail to addresses
obtained from an untrusted source (such as a web form) should use the
"--" separator before the email addresses (which was fixed to work
properly in this update), or they should be changed to invoke
"mail -t" or "sendmail -i -t" instead, passing the recipient addresses
as part of the mail header.

For the oldstable distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in
version 8.1.2-0.20100314cvs-1+deb6u1.

We recommend that you upgrade your bsd-mailx packages.

[DLA 114-1] heirloom-mailx security update

Package : heirloom-mailx
Version : 12.4-2+deb6u1
CVE ID : CVE-2004-2771 CVE-2014-7844

Two security vulnerabilities were discovered in Heirloom mailx, an
implementation of the "mail" command:

CVE-2004-2771

mailx interprets interprets shell meta-characters in certain email
addresses.

CVE-2014-7844

An unexpected feature of mailx treats syntactically valid email
addresses as shell commands to execute.

Shell command execution can be re-enabled using the "expandaddr"
option.

Note that this security update does not remove all mailx facilities
for command execution, though. Scripts which send mail to addresses
obtained from an untrusted source (such as a web form) should use the
"--" separator before the email addresses (which was fixed to work
properly in this update), or they should be changed to invoke
"mail -t" or "sendmail -i -t" instead, passing the recipient addresses
as part of the mail header.

For the oldstable distribution (squeeze), these problems have been fixed in
version 12.4-2+deb6u1.

We recommend that you upgrade your heirloom-mailx packages.