USN-2440-1: Mutt vulnerability

11 December 2014

The mutt mail client could be made to crash if it opened a specially crafted email.

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Releases

Packages

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

Details

Jakub Wilk discovered that the write_one_header function in mutt
did not properly handle newline characters at the beginning of a
header. An attacker could specially craft an email to cause mutt to
crash, resulting in a denial of service.

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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 14.10
Ubuntu 14.04
Ubuntu 12.04
Ubuntu 10.04

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

References

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Further reading