[Esd-l] FYI critical sendmail vulnerability

John D. Hardin jhardin at impsec.org
Tue Mar 4 06:37:11 PST 2003


On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, daniel lance herrick wrote:

> The cert advisory says the patch reports
> 
> "Dropped invalid comments from header address"
> 
> Doesn't that make this the misuse of rfc822
> comments that was discussed in this list a couple
> weeks ago?

The sanitizer drops RFC822 comments from within MIME attachment
filenames. It doesn't try to sanitize the RFC822 headers in the
sendmail vulnerability ( From:, To: and Cc: ).

I suppose it would be fairly easy to length-limit RFC-822 comments in
all headers, and I'll take a look at doing that, but then again as
Brent has pointed out it's pretty difficult to protect the MTA using
procmail... :)

--
 John Hardin KA7OHZ    ICQ#15735746    http://www.impsec.org/~jhardin/
 jhardin at impsec.org                        pgpk -a jhardin at impsec.org
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