USN-153-1: fetchmail vulnerability

Releases

• Ubuntu 5.04
• Ubuntu 4.10

Details

Ross Boylan discovered a remote buffer overflow in fetchmail. By
sending invalid responses with very long UIDs, a faulty or malicious
POP server could crash fetchmail or execute arbitrary code with the
privileges of the user invoking fetchmail.

fetchmail is commonly run as root to fetch mail for multiple user
accounts; in this case, this vulnerability could be exploited to
compromise the whole system.

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 5.04

• fetchmail -

Ubuntu 4.10

• fetchmail -

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

References

• CVE-2005-2335