USN-59-1: mailman vulnerabilities

A mailman security update is available for Ubuntu Linux 4.10

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Ubuntu Security Notice USN-59-1 January 10, 2005
mailman vulnerabilities
CAN-2004-1177, http://bugs.debian.org/285839
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A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases:

Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog)

The following packages are affected:

mailman

The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version 2.1.5-1ubuntu2.2. In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes.

Details follow:

Florian Weimer discovered a cross-site scripting vulnerability in mailman's automatically generated error messages. An attacker could craft an URL containing JavaScript (or other content embedded into HTML) which triggered a mailman error page. When an unsuspecting user followed this URL, the malicious content was copied unmodified to the error page and executed in the context of this page.

Juha-Matti Tapio discovered an information disclosure in the private rosters management. Everybody could check whether a specified email address was subscribed to a private mailing list by looking at the error message. This bug was Ubuntu/Debian specific.

Important note:

There is currently another known vulnerability: when an user subscribes to a mailing list without choosing a password, mailman automatically generates one. However, there are only about 5 million different possible passwords which allows brute force attacks.

A different password generation algorithm already exists, but is currently too immature to be put into a stable release security update. Therefore it is advisable to always explicitly choose a password for subscriptions, at least until this gets fixed in Warty Warthog.

See https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/4892 for details.


Source archives:

http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/m/mailman/mailman_2.1.5-1ubuntu2.1.diff.gz
Size/MD5: 126741 01388ca6ce18ad7c6ffed0dd80331787
http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/m/mailman/mailman_2.1.5-1ubuntu2.1.dsc
Size/MD5: 658 a7fdf27bc0a54c7ce646c068ccbab069
http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/m/mailman/mailman_2.1.5-1ubuntu2.2.diff.gz
Size/MD5: 126788 0c685a329b175f2cd9bef8c86ddd3179
http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/m/mailman/mailman_2.1.5-1ubuntu2.2.dsc
Size/MD5: 658 f0251d2cb874e9b11d89e784b742ea8e
http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/m/mailman/mailman_2.1.5.orig.tar.gz
Size/MD5: 5745912 f5f56f04747cd4aff67427e7a45631af

amd64 architecture (Athlon64, Opteron, EM64T Xeon)

http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/m/mailman/mailman_2.1.5-1ubuntu2.2_amd64.deb
Size/MD5: 6602214 27b11a8db50589de58d10d3332dc8ddb

i386 architecture (x86 compatible Intel/AMD)

http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/m/mailman/mailman_2.1.5-1ubuntu2.2_i386.deb
Size/MD5: 6601678 b7ddc324749fe4f4dae5f822c2d37ded

powerpc architecture (Apple Macintosh G3/G4/G5)

http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/m/mailman/mailman_2.1.5-1ubuntu2.2_powerpc.deb
Size/MD5: 6610730 ac37d779df320be8dfe6fb86f4c6293d