CERT/CC Vulnerability Note VU#780737

Overview

Pine is a mail user agent (MUA) written and distributed by the University of Washington. Some versions contain a buffer overflow vulnerability in email address handling.

Description

Versions of Pine prior to 4.50 contain a remotely exploitable buffer overflow in the addr_list_string() function. Due to incorrect calculation of string length in est_size(), a message From: header that contains a long string of escaped characters can cause a buffer being used by the addr_list_string() function to overflow. It is important to note that the From: header is under full control of the remote user sending mail and as such can contain any characters that they supply.

Impact

An attacker can construct a message with a crafted From: header that will cause Pine to crash with a segmentation fault, possibly resulting in a core dump. Pine users may be unable to restart the application if messages containing the crafted From: headers appear in mailboxes that Pine is configured to check at startup.

Additionally, it may be possible for intruders to execute code on the heap of systems using vulnerable versions of the software. The code would be executed in the context of the user running the Pine program.

Solution

Pine 4.50 has been released and contains a patch for this vulnerability. Users of versions earlier than 4.50 are encouraged to upgrade.

Workarounds

It may be possible to filter messages containing headers that exploit this vulnerability before they are delivered to mailboxes that Pine reads by using a tool such as Procmail or Sieve.

Users of vulnerable versions of Pine may be able to delete existing messages containing the malicious From: headers either manually or from another mail client.

Vendor Information

780737

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Conectiva Affected

Gentoo Linux Affected

Guardian Digital Inc. Affected

MandrakeSoft Affected

Red Hat Inc. Affected

SuSE Inc. Affected

University of Washington Affected

CVSS Metrics

Group	Score	Vector
Base
Temporal
Environmental

References

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Linus Sjrg for reporting this vulnerability.

This document was written by Chad R Dougherty.

Other Information

CVE IDs:	CVE-2002-1320
Severity Metric:	10.94
Date Public:	2002-11-07
Date First Published:	2002-12-09
Date Last Updated:	2003-01-09 15:51 UTC
Document Revision:	14

Software Engineering Institute

CERT Coordination Center

Pine MUA contains buffer overflow in addr_list_string()

Vulnerability Note VU#780737