Stefan Esser discovered several buffer overflows in the handling of URLs. By attempting to load an URL with a specially crafted invalid hostname, a local attacker could exploit this to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the application that uses the cURL library.
It is not possible to trick cURL into loading a malicious URL with an HTTP redirect, so this vulnerability was usually not exploitable remotely. However, it could be exploited locally to e. g. circumvent PHP security restrictions.
13 December 2005
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Stefan Esser discovered several buffer overflows in the handling of URLs. By attempting to load an URL with a specially crafted invalid hostname, a local attacker could exploit this to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the application that uses the cURL library.
It is not possible to trick cURL into loading a malicious URL with an HTTP redirect, so this vulnerability was usually not exploitable remotely. However, it could be exploited locally to e. g. circumvent PHP security restrictions.
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
Vulmon