USN-1596-1: Python 2.6 vulnerabilities
4 October 2012
Several security issues were fixed in Python 2.6.
Releases
Packages
- python2.6 - An interactive high-level object-oriented language
Details
It was discovered that Python would prepend an empty string to sys.path
under certain circumstances. A local attacker with write access to the
current working directory could exploit this to execute arbitrary code.
(CVE-2008-5983)
It was discovered that the audioop module did not correctly perform input
validation. If a user or automatated system were tricked into opening a
crafted audio file, an attacker could cause a denial of service via
application crash. (CVE-2010-1634, CVE-2010-2089)
Giampaolo Rodola discovered several race conditions in the smtpd module.
A remote attacker could exploit this to cause a denial of service via
daemon outage. (CVE-2010-3493)
It was discovered that the CGIHTTPServer module did not properly perform
input validation on certain HTTP GET requests. A remote attacker could
potentially obtain access to CGI script source files. (CVE-2011-1015)
Niels Heinen discovered that the urllib and urllib2 modules would process
Location headers that specify a redirection to file: URLs. A remote
attacker could exploit this to obtain sensitive information or cause a
denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 11.04. (CVE-2011-1521)
It was discovered that SimpleHTTPServer did not use a charset parameter in
the Content-Type HTTP header. An attacker could potentially exploit this
to conduct cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks against Internet Explorer 7
users. This issue only affected Ubuntu 11.04. (CVE-2011-4940)
It was discovered that Python distutils contained a race condition when
creating the ~/.pypirc file. A local attacker could exploit this to obtain
sensitive information. (CVE-2011-4944)
It was discovered that SimpleXMLRPCServer did not properly validate its
input when handling HTTP POST requests. A remote attacker could exploit
this to cause a denial of service via excessive CPU utilization.
(CVE-2012-0845)
It was discovered that Python was susceptible to hash algorithm attacks.
An attacker could cause a denial of service under certian circumstances.
This update adds the '-R' command line option and honors setting the
PYTHONHASHSEED environment variable to 'random' to salt str and datetime
objects with an unpredictable value. (CVE-2012-1150)
Update instructions
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
Ubuntu 11.10
Ubuntu 11.04
Ubuntu 10.04
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.
Related notices
- USN-1613-1: python2.5, python2.5-minimal
- USN-1613-2: python2.4, python2.4-minimal
- USN-1616-1: python3.1, python3.1-minimal
- USN-1314-1: python3.2, python3.1, python3.1-minimal, python3.2-minimal
- USN-1592-1: python2.7-minimal, python2.7
- USN-1615-1: python3.2, python3.2-minimal