Debian Security Advisory

DSA-294-1 gkrellm-newsticker -- missing quoting, incomplete parser

Date Reported:

23 Apr 2003

Affected Packages:

gkrellm-newsticker

Vulnerable:

Yes

Security database references:

In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CAN-2003-0205, CAN-2003-0206.

More information:

Brian Campbell discovered two security-related problems in gkrellm-newsticker, a plugin for the gkrellm system monitor program, which provides a news ticker from RDF feeds. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems:

CAN-2003-0205

It can launch a web browser of the user's choice when the ticker title is clicked by using the URI given by the feed. However, special shell characters are not properly escaped enabling a malicious feed to execute arbitrary shell commands on the clients machine.

CAN-2003-0206

It crashes the entire gkrellm system on feeds where link or title elements are not entirely on a single line. A malicious server could therefore craft a denial of service.

For the stable distribution (woody) these problems have been fixed in version 0.3-3.1.

The old stable distribution (potato) is not affected since it doesn't contain gkrellm-newsticker packages.

For the unstable distribution (sid) these problems is not yet fixed.

We recommend that you upgrade your gkrellm-newsticker package.

Fixed in:

Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (woody)

Source:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1.dsc

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1.diff.gz

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3.orig.tar.gz

Alpha:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1_alpha.deb

ARM:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1_arm.deb

Intel IA-32:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1_i386.deb

Intel IA-64:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1_ia64.deb

HPPA:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1_hppa.deb

Motorola 680x0:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1_m68k.deb

Big endian MIPS:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1_mips.deb

Little endian MIPS:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1_mipsel.deb

PowerPC:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1_powerpc.deb

IBM S/390:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1_s390.deb

Sun Sparc:

http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/g/gkrellm-newsticker/gkrellm-newsticker_0.3-3.1_sparc.deb

MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.