7.2 - DSA-254

A vulnerability has been discovered in NANOG traceroute, an enhanced version of the Van Jacobson/BSD traceroute program. A buffer overflow occurs in the 'get_origin()' function. Due to insufficient bounds checking performed by the whois parser, it may be possible to corrupt memory on the system stack. This vulnerability can be exploited by a remote attacker to gain root privileges on a target host. Though, most probably not in Debian.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) project additionally identified the following vulnerabilities which were already fixed in the Debian version in stable (woody) and oldstable (potato) and are mentioned here for completeness (and since other distributions had to release a separate advisory for them):

* CAN-2002-1364 (BugTraq ID 6166) talks about a buffer overflow in the get_origin function which allows attackers to execute arbitrary code via long WHOIS responses.

* CAN-2002-1051 (BugTraq ID 4956) talks about a format string vulnerability that allows local users to execute arbitrary code via the -T (terminator) command line argument.

* CAN-2002-1386 talks about a buffer overflow that may allow local users to execute arbitrary code via a long hostname argument.

* CAN-2002-1387 talks about the spray mode that may allow local users to overwrite arbitrary memory locations.

Fortunately, the Debian package drops privileges quite early after startup, so those problems aer not likely to result in an exploit on a Debian machine.

For the current stable distribution (woody) the above problem has been fixed in version 6.1.1-1.2.

For the old stable distribution (potato) the above problem has been fixed in version 6.0-2.2.

For the unstable distribution (sid) these problems have been fixed in version 6.3.0-1.

We recommend that you upgrade your traceroute-nanog package.

wget url will fetch the file for you dpkg -i file.deb will install the referenced file.

If you are using the apt-get package manager, use the line for sources.list as given below:

apt-get update will update the internal database apt-get upgrade will install corrected packages

You may use an automated update by adding the resources from the footer to the proper configuration.

Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 alias potato