Midnight commander (mc) 4.5.55 and earlier allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop) via unknown attack vectors.

Andrew V. Samoilov reported several vulnerabilities that were corrected in MidnightCommand 4.6.0 :

- Format string issues (CVE-2004-1004)

- Buffer overflows (CVE-2004-1005)

- Denial-of-service, infinite loop (CVE-2004-1009)

- Denial-of-service, corrupted section header (CVE-2004-1090)

- Denial-of-service, NULL pointer dereference (CVE-2004-1091)

- Freeing unallocated memory (CVE-2004-1092)

- Using already freed memory (CVE-2004-1093)

Updated mc packages that fix several security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1.

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

Midnight Commander is a visual shell much like a file manager.

Several denial of service bugs were found in Midnight Commander. These bugs could cause Midnight Commander to hang or crash if a victim opens a carefully crafted file. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the names CVE-2004-1009, CVE-2004-1090, CVE-2004-1091, CVE-2004-1093 and CVE-2004-1174 to these issues.

A filename quoting bug was found in Midnight Commander's FISH protocol handler. If a victim connects via embedded SSH support to a host containing a carefully crafted filename, arbitrary code may be executed as the user running Midnight Commander. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2004-1175 to this issue.

A buffer overflow bug was found in the way Midnight Commander handles directory completion. If a victim uses completion on a maliciously crafted directory path, it is possible for arbitrary code to be executed as the user running Midnight Commander. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2005-0763 to this issue.

Users of mc are advised to upgrade to these packages, which contain backported security patches to correct these issues.

Andrew V. Samoilov has noticed that several bugfixes which were applied to the source by upstream developers of mc, the midnight commander, a file browser and manager, were not backported to the current version of mc that Debian ships in their stable release. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Project identifies the following vulnerabilities :

  - CAN-2004-1004     Multiple format string vulnerabilities

  - CAN-2004-1005

    Multiple buffer overflows

  - CAN-2004-1009

    One infinite loop vulnerability

  - CAN-2004-1090

    Denial of service via corrupted section header

  - CAN-2004-1091

    Denial of service via null dereference

  - CAN-2004-1092

    Freeing unallocated memory

  - CAN-2004-1093

    Denial of service via use of already freed memory

  - CAN-2004-1174

    Denial of service via manipulating non-existing file     handles

  - CAN-2004-1175

    Unintended program execution via insecure filename     quoting

  - CAN-2004-1176

    Denial of service via a buffer underflow

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
18884	FreeBSD : mc -- multiple vulnerabilities (2b2b333b-6bd3-11d9-95f8-000a95bc6fae)	Nessus	FreeBSD Local Security Checks	high
18512	RHEL 2.1 : mc (RHSA-2005:512)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	high
16165	Debian DSA-639-1 : mc - several vulnerabilities	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	high

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2004-1009

high

Tenable Plugins

high

high

high