USN-2147-1: Mutt vulnerability

13 March 2014

The mutt mail client could be made to crash or run programs as your login if it opened a specially crafted email.

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Releases

Packages

  • mutt - text-based mailreader supporting MIME, GPG, PGP and threading

Details

Beatrice Torracca and Evgeni Golov discovered a buffer overflow
in mutt while expanding addresses when parsing email headers. An
attacker could specially craft an email to cause mutt to crash,
resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code
with the privileges of the user invoking mutt.

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Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

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Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 13.10
Ubuntu 12.10
Ubuntu 12.04
Ubuntu 10.04

After a standard system update you need to restart mutt to make
all the necessary changes.

References

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Further reading