Cherokee: Format string vulnerability — GLSA 200411-02

Cherokee contains a format string vulnerability that could lead to denial of service or the execution of arbitary code.

Affected packages

www-servers/cherokee on all architectures
Affected versions <= 0.4.17
Unaffected versions >= 0.4.17.1

Background

Cherokee is an extra-light web server.

Description

Florian Schilhabel from the Gentoo Linux Security Audit Team found a format string vulnerability in the cherokee_logger_ncsa_write_string() function.

Impact

Using a specially crafted URL when authenticating via auth_pam, a malicious user may be able to crash the server or execute arbitrary code on the target machine with permissions of the user running Cherokee.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Cherokee users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=www-servers/cherokee-0.4.17.1"

References

Release date
November 01, 2004

Latest revision
May 22, 2006: 02

Severity
high

Exploitable
remote

Bugzilla entries