Title: BSD mailx 8.1.1-10 Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
Severity: LOW
Description:
Some Linux distributions ship with BSD mailx 8.1.1-10 (On Slackware 7.x it can be found as /usr/bin/Mail). It is susceptible to a buffer overflow which could be used to gain groupid 'mail'.
The overflow occurs when the cc address argument, passed at the command line, is copied to a local variable without length checks. As a result, oversized values will be copied in their entirety, overwriting memory adjacent to the destination variable. This could be exploited in a typical stack-overflow manner. An attacker could overwrite a function return address in mail's stack with a value pointing tp machine instructions supplied by the attacker (shellcode). When this function returns, it will return into and begin executing these instructions with its effective groupid privileges.
With groupid root, depending on system configuration, an attacker may be able to read or modify the email of arbitrary users, modify e-mail configuration, or otherwise further compromise the system.
Affected Products:
- BSD mailx 8.1.1 -10
- Caldera OpenLinux 2.3.0
- SCO eDesktop 2.4.0
- SCO eServer 2.3.1
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