(RHSA-2007:0368) Moderate: tcpdump security and bug fix update

Tcpdump is a command line tool for monitoring network traffic.

Moritz Jodeit discovered a denial of service bug in the tcpdump IEEE 802.11
processing code. If a certain link type was explicitly specified, an
attacker could inject a carefully crafted frame onto the IEEE 802.11
network that could crash a running tcpdump session. (CVE-2007-1218)

An integer overflow flaw was found in tcpdump’s BGP processing code. An
attacker could execute arbitrary code with the privilege of the pcap user
by injecting a crafted frame onto the network. (CVE-2007-3798)

In addition, the following bugs have been addressed:

• The arpwatch service initialization script would exit prematurely,
  returning an incorrect successful exit status and preventing the status
  command from running in case networking is not available.

• Tcpdump would not drop root privileges completely when launched with the
  -C option. This might have been abused by an attacker to gain root
  privileges in case a security problem was found in tcpdump. Users of
  tcpdump are encouraged to specify meaningful arguments to the -Z option in
  case they want tcpdump to write files with privileges other than of the
  pcap user.

Users of tcpdump are advised to upgrade to these erratum packages, which
contain backported patches that correct these issues.