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Home >> Browse Vulnerability Assessment Database >> Gentoo Local Security Checks >> [GLSA-200606-19] Sendmail: Denial of Service

Vulnerability Assessment Details

[GLSA-200606-19] Sendmail: Denial of Service

Vulnerability Assessment Summary
Sendmail: Denial of Service

Detailed Explanation for this Vulnerability Assessment
The remote host is affected by the vulnerability described in GLSA-200606-19
(Sendmail: Denial of Service)

Frank Sheiness discovered that the mime8to7() function can recurse
endlessly during the decoding of multipart MIME messages until the
stack of the process is filled and the process crashes.

Impact

By sending specially crafted multipart MIME messages, a remote
attacker can cause a subprocess forked by Sendmail to crash. If
Sendmail is not set to use a randomized queue processing, the attack
will effectively halt the delivery of queued mails as well as the
malformed one, incoming mail delivered interactively is not affected.
Additionally, on systems where core dumps with an individual naming
scheme (like "core.pid") are enabled, a filesystem may fill up with
core dumps. Core dumps are disabled by default in Gentoo.

Workaround

The Sendmail 8.13.7 release information offers some workarounds, please
see the Reference below. Note that the issue has actually been fixed in
the 8.13.6-r1 ebuild.

References:
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2006-1173
http://www.sendmail.org/releases/8.13.7.html

Solution:
All Sendmail users should upgrade to the latest version:
# emerge --sync
# emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=mail-mta/sendmail-8.13.6-r1"

Network Security Threat Level: Medium

Networks Security ID:

Vulnerability Assessment Copyright: (C) 2006 Michel Arboi

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