local privilege escalation in mod_ssl, mm

This security announcement covers two different errors in packages used by and used with the apache package. The first bug is an off-by-one overflow in the code responsible for handling configuration directives in mod_ssl, the apache module that enables apache to serve SSL encrypted http protocol. This vulnerability allows a local attacker to use a specially prepared .htaccess file for a denial of service attack against a webserver child, resulting in an increased resource usage overhead on busy webservers, or possibly to execute arbitrary commands as the webserver user (wwwrun in the SuSE case). This bug has been discovered by Frank Denis. The second bug was found by Markus Meissner (while working for Caldera in 2001, now SuSE) and Sebastian Krahmer, SuSE Security, independently. It is a temporary file handling problem in libmm (package name is “mm”), a library for communication between forked processes using IPC semaphores, IPC shared memory and/or shared mmap()'ed files. The vulnerability allows a local attacker to gain root privileges once she has succeeded to gain the (local) privileges of the user wwwrun on the system running the apache webserver.