Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 22:45:02 -0800 From: Aleph One To: BUGTRAQ@netspace.org Subject: Security hole in Netscape Communicator's 4.5 "talkback" function ______________________________________________________________________________ SuSE Security Announcement Package: netscape-4.5-9 Date: Thu Mar 18 10:22:11 CET 1999 Affected: unix operating systems using netscape communicator 4.5 ______________________________________________________________________________ A security whole was discovered in the package mentioned above. Please update as soon as possible or disable the service if you are using this software on your SuSE Linux installation(s). Other Linux distributions or operating systems might be affected as well, please contact your vendor for information about this issue. Please note, that that we provide this information on as "as-is" basis only. There is no warranty whatsoever and no liability for any direct, indirect or incidental damage arising from this information or the installation of the update package. ______________________________________________________________________________ 1. Problem Description The Netscape Communicator 4.5 comes with "talkback", a quality enhancement tool by Fullcircle (www.fullcircle.com). If the communicator crashs for any reason, the file with the name /tmp/.$UID.talkback is read in, and the pid in this file is killed. After that, the file is truncated/created without checks for {sym|hard}links and the pid of the current talkback process is written into the file. 2. Impact Anyone on the system can kill a process of users if their communicator crashs. Anyone on the system can overwrite/create any file an attacked users# has write access to. We didn't check if there's a buffer overflow possible when the talkback application reads in the file. 3. Solution Disable talkback. You may do this my executing the following commands (your path to netscape may differ): /bin/mv /opt/netscape/talkback /opt/netscape/talkback.disable /bin/chmod -R 600 /opt/netscape/talkback Netscape responded to this vulnerability that the current version does not install the talkback application. You may install the new version 4.51 from Netscape which also fixes some other security vulnerabilities. However, if you update from a 4.5 installation, ensure that you execute the lines above. ______________________________________________________________________________ SuSE has got two free security mailing list services to which any interested party may subscribe: suse-security@suse.com - unmoderated and for general/linux/SuSE security discussions. All SuSE security announcements are send to this list. suse-security-announce@suse.com - SuSE's announce-only mailing list. Only SuSE's security annoucements are sent to this list. To subscribe, send an email to majordomo@suse.com with the text subscribe suse-security or subscribe suse-security-announce in the body of the message. Or just issue a echo subscribe suse-security | mail majordomo@suse.com or echo subscribe suse-security-announce | mail majordomo@suse.com ______________________________________________________________________________ If you want to report *NEW* security bugs in the SuSE Linux Distribution please send an email to security@suse.de or call our support line. You may use pgp with the public key below to ensure confidentiality. ______________________________________________________________________________ This information is provided freely to everyone interested and may be redistributed provided that it is not altered in any way. Type Bits/KeyID Date User ID pub 2048/3D25D3D9 1999/03/06 SuSE Security Team -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.3i mQENAzbhLQQAAAEIAKAkXHe0lWRBXLpn38hMHy03F0I4Sszmoc8aaKJrhfhyMlOA BqvklPLE2f9UrI4Xc860gH79ZREwAgPt0pi6+SleNFLNcNFAuuHMLQOOsaMFatbz JR9i4m/lf6q929YROu5zB48rBAlcfTm+IBbijaEdnqpwGib45wE/Cfy6FAttBHQh 1Kp+r/jPbf1mYAvljUfHKuvbg8t2EIQz/5yGp+n5trn9pElfQO2cRBq8LFpf1l+U P7EKjFmlOq+Gs/fF98/dP3DfniSd78LQPq5vp8RL8nr/o2i7jkAQ33m4f1wOBWd+ cZovrKXYlXiR+Bf7m2hpZo+/sAzhd7LmAD0l09kABRG0JVN1U0UgU2VjdXJpdHkg VGVhbSA8c2VjdXJpdHlAc3VzZS5kZT6JARUDBRA24S1H5Fiyh7HKPEUBAVcOB/9b yHYji1/+4Xc2GhvXK0FSJN0MGgeXgW47yxDL7gmR4mNgjlIOUHZj0PEpVjWepOJ7 tQS3L9oP6cpj1Fj/XxuLbkp5VCQ61hpt54coQAvYrnT9rtWEGN+xmwejT1WmYmDJ xG+EGBXKr+XP69oIUl1E2JO3rXeklulgjqRKos4cdXKgyjWZ7CP9V9daRXDtje63 Om8gwSdU/nCvhdRIWp/Vwbf7Ia8iZr9OJ5YuQl0DBG4qmGDDrvImgPAFkYFzwlqo choXFQ9y0YVCV41DnR+GYhwl2qBd81T8aXhihEGPIgaw3g8gd8B5o6mPVgl+nJqI BkEYGBusiag2pS6qwznZiQEVAwUQNuEtBHey5gA9JdPZAQFtOAf+KVh939b0J94u v/kpg4xs1LthlhquhbHcKNoVTNspugiC3qMPyvSX4XcBr2PC0cVkS4Z9PY9iCfT+ x9WM96g39dAF+le2CCx7XISk9XXJ4ApEy5g4AuK7NYgAJd39PPbERgWnxjxir9g0 Ix30dS30bW39D+3NPU5Ho9TD/B7UDFvYT5AWHl3MGwo3a1RhTs6sfgL7yQ3U+mvq MkTExZb5mfN1FeaYKMopoI4VpzNVeGxQWIz67VjJHVyUlF20ekOz4kWVgsxkc8G2 saqZd6yv2EwqYTi8BDAduweP33KrQc4KDDommQNDOXxaKOeCoESIdM4p7Esdjq1o L0oixF12Cg== =pIeS -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----