RHEL 4 : ncompress (RHSA-2006:0663)

critical Nessus Plugin ID 22345

Synopsis

The remote Red Hat host is missing a security update for ncompress.

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 host has a package installed that is affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2006:0663 advisory.

The ncompress package contains file compression and decompression utilities, which are compatible with the original UNIX compress utility (.Z file extensions).

Tavis Ormandy of the Google Security Team discovered a lack of bounds checking in ncompress. An attacker could create a carefully crafted file that could execute arbitrary code if uncompressed by a victim. (CVE-2006-1168)

In addition, two bugs that affected Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 ncompress packages were fixed:

* The display statistics and compression results in verbose mode were not shown when operating on zero length files.

* An attempt to compress zero length files resulted in an unexpected return code.

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

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Solution

Update the RHEL ncompress package based on the guidance in RHSA-2006:0663.

Plugin Details

Severity: Critical

ID: 22345

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2006-0663.nasl

Version: 1.26

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 9/14/2006

Updated: 3/21/2025

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 6.7

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Low

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.5

Temporal Score: 5.5

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2006-1168

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Critical

Base Score: 9.8

Temporal Score: 8.5

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:U/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:ncompress, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:3, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:4

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/cpu

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 9/12/2006

Vulnerability Publication Date: 8/14/2006

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2006-1168

BID: 19455

RHSA: 2006:0663

Detections

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