oss-security - CVE Request: pidgin-knotify remote command injection

Follow @Openwall on Twitter for new release announcements and other news

[<prev] [next>] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Message-ID: <20100913002457.100028b07bsvy9fd@horde.stingray.a3li.info>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:24:57 +0200
From: Alex Legler <a3li@...too.org>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: CVE Request: pidgin-knotify remote command injection

Hi,

we received a public report [0] in our Bugzilla about the following  
issue in pidgin-knotify [1]:

"pidgin-knotify is a pidgin plugin that displays received messages and other
notices from pidgin as KDE notifications. It uses system() to invoke ktdialog
and passes the unescaped messages as command line arguments. An attacker could
use this to inject arbitrary commands by sending a prepared message via any
protocol supported by pidgin to the victim.
[...]
The vulnerable system() call is located in src/pidgin-knotify.c, line 71-74:

command = g_strdup_printf("kdialog --title '%s' --passivepopup '%s'  
%d", title,
body, timeout);
[...]
result = system(command);"

All upstream versions seem to be vulnerable. The reporter tried to  
contact upstream a week ago without a response, and the last release  
was Dec '09, so we are assuming upstream is inactive. Maybe our  
maintainer is going to provide a patch. From what I can see only  
Fedora ships the package besides us.

Please assign a CVE id.

Thanks,
Alex

[0] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336916
[1] http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-knotify/

Content of type "application/pgp-signature" skipped

Please check out the Open Source Software Security Wiki, which is counterpart to this mailing list.

Confused about mailing lists and their use? Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia and check out these guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.