RHSA-2009:1185 - Security Advisory

Topic

Updated seamonkey packages that fix a security issue are now available for
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.

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

Description

SeaMonkey is an open source Web browser, email and newsgroup client, IRC
chat client, and HTML editor.

Moxie Marlinspike reported a heap overflow flaw in a regular expression
parser in the NSS library (provided by SeaMonkey) used to match common
names in certificates. A malicious website could present a
carefully-crafted certificate in such a way as to trigger the heap
overflow, leading to a crash or, possibly, arbitrary code execution with
the permissions of the user running SeaMonkey. (CVE-2009-2404)

Note: in order to exploit this issue without further user interaction, the
carefully-crafted certificate would need to be signed by a Certificate
Authority trusted by SeaMonkey, otherwise SeaMonkey presents the victim
with a warning that the certificate is untrusted. Only if the user then
accepts the certificate will the overflow take place.

All SeaMonkey users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain
a backported patch to correct this issue. After installing the updated
packages, SeaMonkey must be restarted for the update to take effect.

Solution

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

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use
the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 3 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 3 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 3 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 3 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 3 s390
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 3 ppc

Fixes

• BZ - 512912 - CVE-2009-2404 nss regexp heap overflow

CVEs

• CVE-2009-2404

References

• http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#critical