The smiley theme functionality in Gaim before 0.82 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands via shell metacharacters in the filename of the tar file that is dragged to the smiley selector.

The Gaim Security Issues page documents a problem with installing smiley themes from an untrusted source :

To install a new smiley theme, a user can drag a tarball from a graphical file manager, or a hypertext link to one from a web browser.
When a tarball is dragged, Gaim executes a shell command to untar it.
However, it does not escape the filename before sending it to the shell. Thus, a specially crafted filename could execute arbitrary commands if the user could be convinced to drag a file into the smiley theme selector.

More vulnerabilities have been discovered in the gaim instant messenger client. The vulnerabilities pertinent to version 0.75, which is the version shipped with Mandrakelinux 10.0, are: installing smiley themes could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands via shell metacharacters in the filename of the tar file that is dragged to the smiley selector. There is also a buffer overflow in the way gaim handles receiving very long URLs.

The provided packages have been patched to fix these problems. These issues, amongst others, have been fixed upstream in version 0.82.

An updated gaim package that fixes several security issues is now available.

Gaim is an instant messenger client that can handle multiple protocols.

Buffer overflow bugs were found in the Gaim MSN protocol handler. In order to exploit these bugs, an attacker would have to perform a man in the middle attack between the MSN server and the vulnerable Gaim client. Such an attack could allow arbitrary code execution. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2004-0500 to this issue.

Buffer overflow bugs have been found in the Gaim URL decoder, local hostname resolver, and the RTF message parser. It is possible that a remote attacker could send carefully crafted data to a vulnerable client and lead to a crash or arbitrary code execution. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2004-0785 to this issue.

A shell escape bug has been found in the Gaim smiley theme file installation. When a user installs a smiley theme, which is contained within a tar file, the unarchiving of the data is done in an unsafe manner. An attacker could create a malicious smiley theme that would execute arbitrary commands if the theme was installed by the victim.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2004-0784 to this issue.

An integer overflow bug has been found in the Gaim Groupware message receiver. It is possible that if a user connects to a malicious server, an attacker could send carefully crafted data which could lead to arbitrary code execution on the victims machine. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2004-0754 to this issue.

Users of Gaim are advised to upgrade to this updated package which contains Gaim version 0.82 and is not vulnerable to these issues.

The remote host is affected by the vulnerability described in GLSA-200408-27 (Gaim: New vulnerabilities)

    Gaim fails to do proper bounds checking when:
    Handling MSN messages (partially fixed with GLSA 200408-12).
    Handling rich text format messages.
    Resolving local hostname.
    Receiving long URLs.
    Handling groupware messages.
    Allocating memory for webpages with fake content-length     header.
    Furthermore Gaim fails to escape filenames when using drag and drop     installation of smiley themes.
  Impact :

    These vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to crash Gaim or execute     arbitrary code or commands with the permissions of the user running     Gaim.
  Workaround :

    There is no known workaround at this time. All users are encouraged to     upgrade to the latest available version of Gaim.

0.82 update contains many bug and security improvements.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Fedora security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

The remote host appears to be running Gaim, a popular open-source multi-protocol instant messenger. It is reported that this version of Gaim is prone to multiple vulnerabilities including several buffer and heap overflows. These vulnerabilities may permit an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the remote computer.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
18959	FreeBSD : gaim -- malicious smiley themes (635bf5f4-26b7-11d9-9289-000c41e2cdad)	Nessus	FreeBSD Local Security Checks	high
15546	Mandrake Linux Security Advisory : gaim (MDKSA-2004:110)	Nessus	Mandriva Local Security Checks	high
14696	RHEL 3 : gaim (RHSA-2004:400)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	high
14583	GLSA-200408-27 : Gaim: New vulnerabilities	Nessus	Gentoo Local Security Checks	high
14374	Fedora Core 2 : gaim-0.82-0.FC2 (2004-279)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	high
14373	Fedora Core 1 : gaim-0.82-0.FC1 (2004-278)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	high
2159	Gaim < 0.82 Multiple Overflows	Nessus Network Monitor	Internet Messengers	medium

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2004-0784

critical

Tenable Plugins

high

high

high

high

high

high

medium