RHSA-2003:360 - Security Advisory

Topic

Updated Apache packages that fix a minor security issue are now available
for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Description

The Apache HTTP server is a powerful, full-featured, efficient, and
freely-available Web server.

An issue in the handling of regular expressions from configuration files
was discovered in releases of the Apache HTTP Server version 1.3 prior to
1.3.29. To exploit this issue an attacker would need to have the ability
to write to Apache configuration files such as .htaccess or httpd.conf. A
carefully-crafted configuration file can cause an exploitable buffer
overflow and would allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code in the
context of the server (in default configurations as the 'apache' user).
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has
assigned the name CAN-2003-0542 to this issue.

This update also includes an alternative version of the httpd binary which
supports setting the MaxClients configuration directive to values above 256.

All users of the Apache HTTP Web Server are advised to upgrade to the
applicable errata packages, which contain back-ported fixes correcting
the above security issue.

Note that the instructions in the "Solution" section of this errata contain
additional steps required to complete the upgrade process.

Solution

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

To update all RPMs for your particular architecture, run:

rpm -Fvh [filenames]

where [filenames] is a list of the RPMs you wish to upgrade. Only those
RPMs which are currently installed will be updated. Those RPMs which are
not installed but included in the list will not be updated. Note that you
can also use wildcards (*.rpm) if your current directory *only* contains the
desired RPMs.

Please note that this update is also available via Red Hat Network. Many
people find this an easier way to apply updates. To use Red Hat Network,
launch the Red Hat Update Agent with the following command:

up2date

This will start an interactive process that will result in the appropriate
RPMs being upgraded on your system.

If up2date fails to connect to Red Hat Network due to SSL
Certificate Errors, you need to install a version of the
up2date client with an updated certificate. The latest version of
up2date is available from the Red Hat FTP site and may also be
downloaded directly from the RHN website:

https://rhn.redhat.com/help/latest-up2date.pxt

After the errata packages are installed, restart the Web service by running
the following command as root:

/sbin/service httpd restart

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 2 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 2 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 2 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 2 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 110328 - CAN-2003-0542 local buffer overflow in config file parsing

CVEs

• CVE-2003-0542

References

(none)