USN-206-1: Lynx vulnerability

Releases

• Ubuntu 5.10
• Ubuntu 5.04
• Ubuntu 4.10

Details

Ulf Harnhammar discovered a remote vulnerability in Lynx when
connecting to a news server (NNTP). The function that added missing
escape chararacters to article headers did not check the size of the
target buffer. Specially crafted news entries could trigger a buffer
overflow, which could be exploited to execute arbitrary code with the
privileges of the user running lynx. In order to exploit this, the
user is not even required to actively visit a news site with Lynx
since a malicious HTML page could automatically redirect to an nntp://
URL with malicious news items.

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 5.10

• lynx -

Ubuntu 5.04

• lynx -

Ubuntu 4.10

• lynx -

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

References

• CVE-2005-3120