Oracle Linux 4 : sendmail (ELSA-2011-0262)

high Nessus Plugin ID 68203

Synopsis

The remote Oracle Linux host is missing one or more security updates.

Description

From Red Hat Security Advisory 2011:0262 :

Updated sendmail packages that fix one security issue and three bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having low security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

Sendmail is a Mail Transport Agent (MTA) used to send mail between machines.

A flaw was found in the way sendmail handled NUL characters in the CommonName field of X.509 certificates. An attacker able to get a carefully-crafted certificate signed by a trusted Certificate Authority could trick sendmail into accepting it by mistake, allowing the attacker to perform a man-in-the-middle attack or bypass intended client certificate authentication. (CVE-2009-4565)

The CVE-2009-4565 issue only affected configurations using TLS with certificate verification and CommonName checking enabled, which is not a typical configuration.

This update also fixes the following bugs :

* Previously, sendmail did not correctly handle mail messages that had a long first header line. A line with more than 2048 characters was split, causing the part of the line exceeding the limit, as well as all of the following mail headers, to be incorrectly handled as the message body. (BZ#499450)

* When an SMTP-sender is sending mail data to sendmail, it may spool that data to a file in the mail queue. It was found that, if the SMTP-sender stopped sending data and a timeout occurred, the file may have been left stalled in the mail queue, instead of being deleted.
This update may not correct this issue for every situation and configuration. Refer to the Solution section for further information.
(BZ#434645)

* Previously, the sendmail macro MAXHOSTNAMELEN used 64 characters as the limit for the hostname length. However, in some cases, it was used against an FQDN length, which has a maximum length of 255 characters.
With this update, the MAXHOSTNAMELEN limit has been changed to 255.
(BZ#485380)

All sendmail users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. After installing this update, sendmail will be restarted automatically.

Solution

Update the affected sendmail packages.

See Also

https://oss.oracle.com/pipermail/el-errata/2011-February/001948.html

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 68203

File Name: oraclelinux_ELSA-2011-0262.nasl

Version: 1.15

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 7/12/2013

Updated: 1/14/2021

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 3.4

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.5

Temporal Score: 5.5

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

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:oracle:linux:sendmail, p-cpe:/a:oracle:linux:sendmail-cf, p-cpe:/a:oracle:linux:sendmail-devel, p-cpe:/a:oracle:linux:sendmail-doc, cpe:/o:oracle:linux:4

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/OracleLinux

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 2/24/2011

Vulnerability Publication Date: 1/4/2010

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2009-4565

BID: 37543

CWE: 310

IAVA: 2010-A-0002

RHSA: 2011:0262