RHSA-2006:0265 - Security Advisory

Topic

Updated sendmail packages to fix a security issue are now available for Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1.

This update has been rated as having critical security impact by the Red
Hat Security Response Team.

Description

Sendmail is a Mail Transport Agent (MTA) used to send mail between machines.

A flaw in the handling of asynchronous signals was discovered in Sendmail.
A remote attacker may be able to exploit a race condition to execute
arbitrary code as root. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project
assigned the name CVE-2006-0058 to this issue.

By default on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, Sendmail is configured to only
accept connections from the local host. Therefore only users who have
configured Sendmail to listen to remote hosts would be able to be remotely
exploited by this vulnerability.

In order to correct this issue for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 users, it
was necessary to upgrade the version of Sendmail from 8.11 as originally
shipped to Sendmail 8.12 with the addition of the security patch supplied
by Sendmail Inc. This erratum provides updated packages based on Sendmail
8.12 with a compatibility mode enabled. After updating to these packages,
users should pay close attention to their sendmail logs to ensure that the
upgrade completed sucessfully.

Solution

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

This update is available via Red Hat Network. 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.

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 - 184465 - CVE-2006-0058 Sendmail race condition issue

CVEs

• CVE-2006-0058

References

(none)