RHEL 5 : lftp (RHSA-2009:1278)

critical Nessus Plugin ID 40836

Synopsis

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

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 host has a package installed that is affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2009:1278 advisory.

LFTP is a sophisticated file transfer program for the FTP and HTTP protocols. Like bash, it has job control and uses the readline library for input. It has bookmarks, built-in mirroring, and can transfer several files in parallel. It is designed with reliability in mind.

It was discovered that lftp did not properly escape shell metacharacters when generating shell scripts using the mirror --script command. A mirroring script generated to download files from a malicious FTP server could allow an attacker controlling the FTP server to run an arbitrary command as the user running lftp. (CVE-2007-2348)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* when using the mirror or get commands with the -c option, lftp did not check for some specific conditions that could result in the program becoming unresponsive, hanging and the command not completing. For example, when waiting for a directory listing, if lftp received a 226 message, denoting an empty directory, it previously ignored the message and kept waiting. With this update, these conditions are properly checked for and lftp no longer hangs when -c is used with mirror or get. (BZ#422881)

* when using the put, mput or reput commands over a Secure FTP (SFTP) connection, specifying the -c option sometimes resulted in corrupted files of incorrect size. With this update, using these commands over SFTP with the -c option works as expected, and transferred files are no longer corrupted in the transfer process. (BZ#434294)

* previously, LFTP linked to the OpenSSL library. OpenSSL's license is, however, incompatible with LFTP's GNU GPL license and LFTP does not include an exception allowing OpenSSL linking. With this update, LFTP links to the GnuTLS (GNU Transport Layer Security) library, which is released under the GNU LGPL license. Like OpenSSL, GnuTLS implements the SSL and TLS protocols, so functionality has not changed. (BZ#458777)

* running help mirror from within lftp only presented a sub-set of the available options compared to the full list presented in the man page. With this update, running help mirror in lftp presents the same list of mirror options as is available in the Commands section of the lftp man page.
(BZ#461922)

* LFTP imports gnu-lib from upstream. Subsequent to gnu-lib switching from GNU GPLv2 to GNU GPLv3, the LFTP license was internally inconsistent, with LFTP licensed as GNU GPLv2 but portions of the package apparently licensed as GNU GPLv3 because of changes made by the gnu-lib import. With this update, LFTP itself switches to GNU GPLv3, resolving the inconsistency.
(BZ#468858)

* when the ls command was used within lftp to present a directory listing on a remote system connected to via HTTP, file names containing spaces were presented incorrectly. This update corrects this behavior. (BZ#504591)

* the default alias edit did not define a default editor. If EDITOR was not set in advance by the system, lftp attempted to execute ~/.lftp/edit.tmp.$$ (which failed because the file is not set to executable). The edit alias also did not support tab-completion of file names and incorrectly interpreted file names containing spaces. The updated package defines a default editor (vi) in the absence of a system-defined EDITOR. The edit alias now also supports tab-completion and handles file names containing spaces correctly for both downloading and uploading.
(BZ#504594)

Note: This update upgrades LFTP from version 3.7.3 to upstream version 3.7.11, which incorporates a number of further bug fixes to those noted above. For details regarding these fixes, refer to the /usr/share/doc/lftp-3.7.11/NEWS file after installing this update.
(BZ#308721)

All LFTP users are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which resolves 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 lftp package based on the guidance in RHSA-2009:1278.

Plugin Details

Severity: Critical

ID: 40836

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2009-1278.nasl

Version: 1.22

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 9/2/2009

Updated: 11/4/2024

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.9

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Low

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.8

Temporal Score: 5

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2007-2348

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: cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:lftp

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

Patch Publication Date: 9/2/2009

Vulnerability Publication Date: 4/27/2007

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2007-2348

RHSA: 2009:1278

Detections

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