USN-59-1: mailman vulnerabilities

Publication date

11 January 2005

Overview

mailman vulnerabilities

Releases


Details

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...

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.


Update instructions

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

Learn more about how to get the fixes.

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu Release Package Version
4.10 warty mailman – 

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