Konversation: Various vulnerabilities

Background

Konversation is a user-friendly IRC client for KDE.

Description

Wouter Coekaerts has discovered three vulnerabilities within Konversation:

• The Server::parseWildcards function, which is used by the “Quick Buttons”, does not properly handle variable expansion (CAN-2005-0129).
• Perl scripts included with Konversation do not properly escape shell metacharacters (CAN-2005-0130).
• The ‘Nick’ and ‘Password’ fields in the Quick Connect dialog can be easily confused (CAN-2005-0131).

Impact

A malicious server could create specially-crafted channels, which would exploit certain flaws in Konversation, potentially leading to the execution of shell commands. A user could also unintentionally input their password into the ‘Nick’ field in the Quick Connect dialog, exposing his password to IRC users, and log files.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Konversation users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=net-irc/konversation-0.15.1"