Sylpheed, Sylpheed-Claws: Buffer overflow in LDIF importer

Background

Sylpheed is a lightweight email client and newsreader. Sylpheed-Claws is a ‘bleeding edge’ version of Sylpheed. They both support the import of address books in LDIF (Lightweight Directory Interchange Format).

Description

Colin Leroy reported buffer overflow vulnerabilities in Sylpheed and Sylpheed-Claws. The LDIF importer uses a fixed length buffer to store data of variable length. Two similar problems exist also in the Mutt and Pine addressbook importers of Sylpheed-Claws.

Impact

By convincing a user to import a specially-crafted LDIF file into the address book, a remote attacker could cause the program to crash, potentially allowing the execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the software.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All Sylpheed users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=mail-client/sylpheed-2.0.4"

All Sylpheed-Claws users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=mail-client/sylpheed-claws-1.0.5-r1"