6.9 - USN-1596-1

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

- Ubuntu 11.10 - Ubuntu 11.04 - Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Summary:

Several security issues were fixed in Python 2.6.

Software Description: - python2.6: An interactive high-level object-oriented language

Details:

It was discovered that Python would prepend an empty string to sys.path under certain circumstances. A local attacker with write access to the current working directory could exploit this to execute arbitrary code. (CVE-2008-5983)

It was discovered that the audioop module did not correctly perform input validation. If a user or automatated system were tricked into opening a crafted audio file, an attacker could cause a denial of service via application crash. (CVE-2010-1634, CVE-2010-2089)

Giampaolo Rodola discovered several race conditions in the smtpd module. A remote attacker could exploit this to cause a denial of service via daemon outage. (CVE-2010-3493)

It was discovered that the CGIHTTPServer module did properly perform input validation on certain HTTP GET requests. A remote attacker could potentially obtain access to CGI script source files. (CVE-2011-1015)

Niels Heinen discovered that the urllib and urllib2 modules would process Location headers that specify a redirection to file: URLs. A remote attacker could exploit this to obtain sensitive information or cause a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 11.04. (CVE-2011-1521)

It was discovered that SimpleHTTPServer did not use a charset parameter in the Content-Type HTTP header. An attacker could potentially exploit this to conduct cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks against Internet Explorer 7 users. This issue only affected Ubuntu 11.04. (CVE-2011-4940)

It was discovered that Python distutils contained a race condition when creating the ~/.pypirc file. A local attacker could exploit this to obtain sensitive information. (CVE-2011-4944)

It was discovered that SimpleXMLRPCServer did not properly validate its input when handling HTTP POST requests. A remote attacker could exploit this to cause a denial of service via excessive CPU utilization. (CVE-2012-0845)

It was discovered that Python was susceptible to hash algorithm attacks. An attacker could cause a denial of service under certian circumstances. This updates adds the '-R' command line option and honors setting the PYTHONHASHSEED environment variable to 'random' to salt str and datetime objects with an unpredictable value. (CVE-2012-1150)

Update instructions:

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 11.10:
python2.6 2.6.7-4ubuntu1.1
python2.6-minimal 2.6.7-4ubuntu1.1

Ubuntu 11.04:
python2.6 2.6.6-6ubuntu7.1
python2.6-minimal 2.6.6-6ubuntu7.1

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS:
python2.6 2.6.5-1ubuntu6.1
python2.6-minimal 2.6.5-1ubuntu6.1

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References:
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-1596-1
CVE-2008-5983, CVE-2010-1634, CVE-2010-2089, CVE-2010-3493,
CVE-2011-1015, CVE-2011-1521, CVE-2011-4940, CVE-2011-4944,
CVE-2012-0845, CVE-2012-1150

Package Information:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python2.6/2.6.7-4ubuntu1.1
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python2.6/2.6.6-6ubuntu7.1
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python2.6/2.6.5-1ubuntu6.1