______________________________________________________________________________
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.
______________________________________________________________________________
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______________________________________________________________________________
If you want to report *NEW* security bugs in the SuSE Linux Distribution
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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
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