KDE 1452 Published by

KDE Security Advisory: Multiple vulnerabilities in Konversation
Original Release Date: 20050121
URL: http://www.kde.org/info/security/advisory-20050121-1.txt

0. References
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2005-0129
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2005-0130
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2005-0131
http://lists.netsys.com/pipermail/full-disclosure/2005-January/031033.html

1. Systems affected:

All Konversation versions up to and including 0.15



2. Overview:

Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in Konversation, an IRC client for KDE.

A flaw in the expansion of %-escaped variables makes that %-escaped variables in certain input strings will be inadvertently expanded too. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CAN-2005-0129 to this issue.

Several perl scripts included with Konversation fail to properly handle command line arguments causing a command line injection vulnerability. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CAN-2005-0130 to this issue.

Nick and password are confused in the quick connection dialog, so connecting with that dialog and filling in a password, would use that password as nick, and may inadvertently expose the password to others. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CAN-2005-0131 to this issue.


3. Impact:

A user might be tricked to join a channel with a specially crafted channel name containing shell commands. If user runs a script in that channel it will result in an arbitrary command execution.

If quick connect is used with a password, the password is used as nickname instead. As a result the password may be exposed to others.

4. Solution:

Upgrade to Konversation 0.15.1 available from
http://download.berlios.de/konversation/konversation-0.15.1.tar.bz2

5. Patch:

A patch for Konversation 0.15 is available from
ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/security_patches

36f8b6beac18a9d173339388d13e2335 post-0.15-konversation.diff

6. Time line and credits:

18/01/2005 Konversation developers informed by Wouter Coekaerts
19/01/2005 Patches applied to KDE CVS.
19/01/2005 Konversation 0.15.1 released.
21/01/2005 KDE Security Advisory released.