Scrubber.py in Mailman 2.1.5-8 does not properly handle UTF8 character encodings in filenames of e-mail attachments, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash).

Two denial of service bugs were found in the mailman list server. In one, attachment filenames containing UTF8 strings were not properly parsed, which could cause the server to crash. In another, a message containing a bad date string could cause a server crash.

The old stable distribution (woody) is not vulnerable to this issue.

An updated mailman package that fixes two security issues is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4.

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

Mailman is software to help manage email discussion lists.

A flaw in handling of UTF8 character encodings was found in Mailman.
An attacker could send a carefully crafted email message to a mailing list run by Mailman which would cause that particular mailing list to stop working. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project assigned the name CVE-2005-3573 to this issue.

A flaw in date handling was found in Mailman version 2.1.4 through 2.1.6. An attacker could send a carefully crafted email message to a mailing list run by Mailman which would cause the Mailman server to crash. (CVE-2005-4153).

Users of Mailman should upgrade to this updated package, which contains backported patches to correct these issues.

Aliet Santiesteban Sifontes discovered a remote Denial of Service vulnerability in the attachment handler. An email with an attachment whose filename contained invalid UTF-8 characters caused mailman to crash. (CVE-2005-3573)

Mailman did not sufficiently verify the validity of email dates. Very large numbers in dates caused mailman to crash. (CVE-2005-4153).

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

Scrubber.py in Mailman 2.1.4 - 2.1.6 does not properly handle UTF8 character encodings in filenames of e-mail attachments, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service. (CVE-2005-3573)

In addition, these versions of mailman have an issue where the server will fail with an Overflow on bad date data in a processed message.

The version of mailman in Corporate Server 2.1 does not contain the above vulnerable code.

Updated packages are patched to correct these issues.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
22821	Debian DSA-955-1 : mailman - DoS	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	high
21892	CentOS 3 / 4 : mailman (CESA-2006:0204)	Nessus	CentOS Local Security Checks	high
21034	RHEL 3 / 4 : mailman (RHSA-2006:0204)	Nessus	Red Hat Local Security Checks	high
20789	Ubuntu 4.10 / 5.04 / 5.10 : mailman vulnerabilities (USN-242-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	high
20453	Mandrake Linux Security Advisory : mailman (MDKSA-2005:222)	Nessus	Mandriva Local Security Checks	high

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2005-3573

high

Tenable Plugins

high

high

high

high

high