Midnight Commander: Multiple vulnerabilities — GLSA 200405-21

Multiple security issues have been discovered in Midnight Commander including several buffer overflows and string format vulnerabilities.

Affected packages

app-misc/mc on all architectures
Affected versions <= 4.6.0-r6
Unaffected versions >= 4.6.0-r7

Background

Midnight Commander is a visual console file manager.

Description

Numerous security issues have been discovered in Midnight Commander, including several buffer overflow vulnerabilities, multiple vulnerabilities in the handling of temporary file and directory creation, and multiple format string vulnerabilities.

Impact

The buffer overflows and format string vulnerabilities may allow attackers to cause a denial of service or execute arbitrary code with permissions of the user running MC. The insecure creation of temporary files and directories could lead to a privilege escalation, including root privileges, for a local attacker.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time. All users are advised to upgrade to version 4.6.0-r7 or higher of Midnight Commander.

Resolution

All Midnight Commander users should upgrade to the latest stable version:

 # emerge sync

 # emerge -pv ">=app-misc/mc-4.6.0-r7
 # emerge ">=app-misc/mc-4.6.0-r7"

References

Release date
May 26, 2004

Latest revision
May 26, 2004: 01

Severity
high

Exploitable
local

Bugzilla entries