USN-253-1: heimdal vulnerability

Publication date

18 February 2006

Overview

heimdal vulnerability


Details

A remote Denial of Service vulnerability was discovered in the heimdal
implementation of the telnet daemon. A remote attacker could force the
server to crash due to a NULL de-reference before the user logged in,
resulting in inetd turning telnetd off because it forked too fast.

Please note that the heimdal-servers package is not officially
supported in Ubuntu (it is in the ‘universe’ component of the
archive). However, this affects you if you use a customized version
built from the heimdal source package (which is supported).

A remote Denial of Service vulnerability was discovered in the heimdal
implementation of the telnet daemon. A remote attacker could force the
server to crash due to a NULL de-reference before the user logged in,
resulting in inetd turning telnetd off because it forked too fast.

Please note that the heimdal-servers package is not officially
supported in Ubuntu (it is in the ‘universe’ component of the
archive). However, this affects you if you use a customized version
built from the heimdal source package (which is supported).

Update instructions

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

Learn more about how to get the fixes.

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu Release Package Version
5.10 breezy heimdal-servers – 
5.04 hoary heimdal-servers – 
4.10 warty heimdal-servers – 

Reduce your security exposure

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