fetchmail: Buffer Overflow — GLSA 200507-21

fetchmail is susceptible to a buffer overflow resulting in a Denial of Service or arbitrary code execution.

Affected packages

Background

fetchmail is a utility that retrieves and forwards mail from remote systems using IMAP, POP, and other protocols.

Description

fetchmail does not properly validate UIDs coming from a POP3 mail server. The UID is placed in a fixed length buffer on the stack, which can be overflown.

Impact

Very long UIDs returned from a malicious or compromised POP3 server can cause fetchmail to crash, resulting in a Denial of Service, or allow arbitrary code to be placed on the stack.

Workaround

There are no known workarounds at this time.

Resolution

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=net-mail/fetchmail-6.2.5.2"

References

• Fetchmail Security Advisory
• CAN-2005-2335

Release date
July 25, 2005

Latest revision
July 25, 2005: 01

Severity
normal

Exploitable
remote

Bugzilla entries

• 99865