The mlfi_envrcpt function in spamass-milter.cpp in SpamAssassin Milter Plugin 0.3.1, when using the expand option, allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary system commands via shell metacharacters in the RCPT TO field of an email message.

This update includes a fix for a problem where if the milter is running using the '-x' option to expand aliases before passing inbound mail through SpamAssassin, a malicious client using a carefully-crafted SMTP session could execute arbitrary code on the mail server. The fix avoids the use of a shell in the alias expansion and hence there is no longer a problem with having to sanitize input from the client. This problem has been assigned CVE-2010-1132, which is tracked upstream at https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?29136 The update also contains improved Received-header-generation for message submission and a fix for a problem where the milter would erroneously log warnings about the mail server's configuration when the first message from a non-authenticated client passed through. As part of the fix for this issue, the required milter macro configuration for the mail server has changed slightly: see the README file included in the package for details.

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 spamassassin milter plugin contains a vulnerability that can allow remote attackers to execute commands on affected systems.

The vulnerability can be exploited trough a special-crafted email header when the plugin was started with the '-x' (expand) flag.

A missing input sanitization in spamass-milter, a milter used to filter mail through spamassassin, was discovered. This allows a remote attacker to inject and execute arbitrary shell commands.

The remote mail server is affected by a command execution vulnerability. 

Specifically, the 'spamass-milter' plugin does not properly sanitize user-supplied input and can be tricked into executing arbitrary commands on the remote server (by default with root privileges).

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
47381	Fedora 11 : spamass-milter-0.3.1-18.fc11 (2010-5176)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	high
47380	Fedora 13 : spamass-milter-0.3.1-18.fc13 (2010-5112)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	high
47378	Fedora 12 : spamass-milter-0.3.1-18.fc12 (2010-5096)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	high
46246	FreeBSD : spamass-milter -- remote command execution vulnerability (7132c842-58e2-11df-8d80-0015587e2cc1)	Nessus	FreeBSD Local Security Checks	high
45134	Debian DSA-2021-1 : spamass-milter - missing input sanitization	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	high
45019	SpamAssassin Milter Plugin 'mlfi_envrcpt()' Remote Arbitrary Command Injection	Nessus	SMTP problems	critical

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2010-1132

critical

Tenable Plugins

high

high

high

high

high

critical