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Ubuntu 4.10 : mailman vulnerabilities (USN-59-1)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 20677

Synopsis

The remote Ubuntu host is missing a security-related patch.

Description

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.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

Solution

Update the affected mailman package.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 20677

File Name: ubuntu_USN-59-1.nasl

Version: 1.16

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 1/15/2006

Updated: 1/19/2021

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 3.0

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.3

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:4.10, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:mailman

Required KB Items: Host/cpu, Host/Debian/dpkg-l, Host/Ubuntu, Host/Ubuntu/release

Patch Publication Date: 1/10/2005

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2004-1177

USN: 59-1