Medium: mailx

Issue Overview:

A flaw was found in the way mailx handled the parsing of email addresses. A syntactically valid email address could allow a local attacker to cause mailx to execute arbitrary shell commands through shell meta-characters and the direct command execution functionality. (CVE-2004-2771, CVE-2014-7844)

Note: Applications using mailx to send email to addresses obtained from untrusted sources will still remain vulnerable to other attacks if they accept email addresses which start with “-” (so that they can be confused with mailx options). To counteract this issue, this update also introduces the “–” option, which will treat the remaining command line arguments as email addresses.

Affected Packages:

mailx

Issue Correction:
Run yum update mailx to update your system.

New Packages:

i686:  
    mailx-12.4-8.8.amzn1.i686  
    mailx-debuginfo-12.4-8.8.amzn1.i686  
  
src:  
    mailx-12.4-8.8.amzn1.src  
  
x86_64:  
    mailx-debuginfo-12.4-8.8.amzn1.x86_64  
    mailx-12.4-8.8.amzn1.x86_64  

Additional References

Red Hat: CVE-2004-2771, CVE-2014-7844

Mitre: CVE-2004-2771, CVE-2014-7844