COMMAND
pine
SYSTEMS AFFECTED
those using pine
PROBLEM
Following is based on a FreeBSD-SA-00:47 Security Advisory and it
was originally found by Juhapekka Tolvanen.
Pine is a popular mail user agent. The pine4 port, versions 4.21
and before, contained a bug which would cause the program to
crash when processing a folder which contains an email message
with a malformed X-Keywords header. The message itself could be
deleted within pine if identified, but other operations such as
closing the folder with the message still present would cause the
program to crash with no apparent cause, discarding changes to
the mailbox.
Remote users can cause pine4 to crash when closing a mail folder
by sending a malformed email. If you have not chosen to install
the pine4 port/package, then your system is not vulnerable to
this problem.
SOLUTION
The FreeBSD port of pine4 was changed on 2000-07-17 to use an
updated version of the c-client library which is used to handle
the mailbox processing. This library does not contain the bug
and versions of pine4 built with it (i.e. ports or packages dated
after the correction date) do not suffer from this vulnerability.
It may be possible to use a mail filtering utility such as
procmail (available in FreeBSD ports as /usr/ports/mail/procmail)
to filter out the malformed X-Keywords header from incoming mail,
but this solution is not discussed here.
For FreeBSD:
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-3-stable/mail/pine-4.21.tgz
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-4-stable/mail/pine-4.21.tgz
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/alpha/packages-4-stable/mail/pine-4.21.tgz
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5-current/mail/pine-4.21.tgz
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/alpha/packages-5-current/mail/pine-4.21.tgz