DSA-339-1 semi -- insecure temporary file

Related Vulnerabilities: CVE-2003-0440  

NOTE: due to a combination of administrative problems, this advisory was erroneously released with the identifier "DSA-337-1". DSA-337-1 correctly refers to an earlier advisory regarding gtksee. semi, a MIME library for GNU Emacs, does not take appropriate security precautions when creating temporary files. This bug could potentially be exploited to overwrite arbitrary files with the privileges of the user running Emacs and semi, potentially with contents supplied by the attacker. wemi is a fork of semi, and contains the same bug. For the stable distribution (woody) this problem has been fixed in semi version 1.14.3.cvs.2001.08.10-1woody2 and wemi version 1.14.0.20010802wemiko-1.3. For the unstable distribution (sid) this problem has been fixed in semi version 1.14.5+20030609-1. The unstable distribution does not contain a wemi package. We recommend that you update your semi and wemi packages.

Debian Security Advisory

DSA-339-1 semi -- insecure temporary file

Date Reported:
06 Jul 2003
Affected Packages:
semi, wemi
Vulnerable:
Yes
Security database references:
In the Bugtraq database (at SecurityFocus): BugTraq ID 8115.
In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2003-0440.
More information:

NOTE: due to a combination of administrative problems, this advisory was erroneously released with the identifier "DSA-337-1". DSA-337-1 correctly refers to an earlier advisory regarding gtksee.

semi, a MIME library for GNU Emacs, does not take appropriate security precautions when creating temporary files. This bug could potentially be exploited to overwrite arbitrary files with the privileges of the user running Emacs and semi, potentially with contents supplied by the attacker.

wemi is a fork of semi, and contains the same bug.

For the stable distribution (woody) this problem has been fixed in semi version 1.14.3.cvs.2001.08.10-1woody2 and wemi version 1.14.0.20010802wemiko-1.3.

For the unstable distribution (sid) this problem has been fixed in semi version 1.14.5+20030609-1. The unstable distribution does not contain a wemi package.

We recommend that you update your semi and wemi packages.

Fixed in:

Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (woody)

Source:
http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/s/semi/semi_1.14.3.cvs.2001.08.10-1woody2.dsc
http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/s/semi/semi_1.14.3.cvs.2001.08.10-1woody2.diff.gz
http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/s/semi/semi_1.14.3.cvs.2001.08.10.orig.tar.gz
http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/w/wemi/wemi_1.14.0.20010802wemiko-1.3.dsc
http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/w/wemi/wemi_1.14.0.20010802wemiko-1.3.diff.gz
http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/w/wemi/wemi_1.14.0.20010802wemiko.orig.tar.gz
Architecture-independent component:
http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/s/semi/semi_1.14.3.cvs.2001.08.10-1woody2_all.deb
http://security.debian.org/pool/updates/main/w/wemi/wemi_1.14.0.20010802wemiko-1.3_all.deb

MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.