RHEL 4 / 5 / 6 : postfix (RHSA-2011:0843)

critical Nessus Plugin ID 54931

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Synopsis

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

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 / 5 / 6 host has packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2011:0843 advisory.

Postfix is a Mail Transport Agent (MTA), supporting LDAP, SMTP AUTH (SASL), and TLS.

A heap-based buffer over-read flaw was found in the way Postfix performed SASL handlers management for SMTP sessions, when Cyrus SASL authentication was enabled. A remote attacker could use this flaw to cause the Postfix smtpd server to crash via a specially-crafted SASL authentication request.
The smtpd process was automatically restarted by the postfix master process after the time configured with service_throttle_time elapsed.
(CVE-2011-1720)

Note: Cyrus SASL authentication for Postfix is not enabled by default.

Red Hat would like to thank the CERT/CC for reporting this issue. Upstream acknowledges Thomas Jarosch of Intra2net AG as the original reporter.

Users of Postfix are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to resolve this issue. After installing this update, the postfix service will be restarted automatically.

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 postfix package based on the guidance in RHSA-2011:0843.

Plugin Details

Severity: Critical

ID: 54931

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2011-0843.nasl

Version: 1.22

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 6/1/2011

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: 6.5

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Moderate

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-2011-1720

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Critical

Base Score: 10

Temporal Score: 8.7

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/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:postfix, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:postfix-pflogsumm, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:6, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:4, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:postfix-perl-scripts

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: 5/31/2011

Vulnerability Publication Date: 5/13/2011

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2011-1720

BID: 47778

RHSA: 2011:0843

Detections

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