Issued:

2014-12-16

Updated:

2014-12-16

RHSA-2014:1999 - Moderate: mailx security update

Synopsis

Moderate: mailx security update

Type/Severity

Security Advisory Moderate

Topic

Updated mailx packages that fix two security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Moderate security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.

Description

The mailx packages contain a mail user agent that is used to manage mail using scripts.

A flaw was found in the way mailx handled the parsing of email addresses. A syntactically valid email address could allow a local attacker to cause mailx to execute arbitrary shell commands through shell meta-characters and the direct command execution functionality. (CVE-2004-2771, CVE-2014-7844)

Note: Applications using mailx to send email to addresses obtained from untrusted sources will still remain vulnerable to other attacks if they accept email addresses which start with "-" (so that they can be confused with mailx options). To counteract this issue, this update also introduces the "--" option, which will treat the remaining command line arguments as email addresses.

All mailx users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

Affected Products

Updated Packages

• mailx-12.4-8.el6_6.x86_64.rpm
• mailx-debuginfo-12.4-8.el6_6.i686.rpm
• mailx-debuginfo-12.5-12.el7_0.s390x.rpm
• mailx-12.4-8.el6_6.i686.rpm
• mailx-12.4-8.el6_6.s390x.rpm
• mailx-12.4-8.el6_6.src.rpm
• mailx-12.4-8.el6_6.ppc64.rpm
• mailx-debuginfo-12.5-12.el7_0.ppc64.rpm
• mailx-12.5-12.el7_0.ppc64.rpm
• mailx-debuginfo-12.5-12.el7_0.x86_64.rpm
• mailx-12.5-12.el7_0.s390x.rpm
• mailx-debuginfo-12.4-8.el6_6.ppc64.rpm
• mailx-debuginfo-12.4-8.el6_6.x86_64.rpm
• mailx-12.5-12.el7_0.x86_64.rpm
• mailx-debuginfo-12.4-8.el6_6.s390x.rpm
• mailx-12.5-12.el7_0.src.rpm

Fixes

• This content is not included.BZ - 1162783

CVEs

• CVE-2004-2771
• CVE-2014-7844

References

• https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#moderate

Additional information

• The Red Hat security contact is This content is not included.secalert@redhat.com. More contact details at https://access.redhat.com/security/team/contact/.
• Offline Security Data data is available for integration with other systems. See Offline Security Data API to get started.