______________________________________________________________________________



                        SuSE Security Announcement



        Package:  proftpd-1.2.0pre6 and earlier

        Date:     Thu Sep 16 20:59:18 CEST 1999

        Affected: all UNIX platforms using proftpd

______________________________________________________________________________



A security hole was discovered in the package mentioned above.

Please update as soon as possible or disable the service if you are using

this software on your SuSE Linux installation(s).



Other Linux distributions or operating systems might be affected as

well, please contact your vendor for information about this issue.



Please note, that that we provide this information on as "as-is" basis only.

There is no warranty whatsoever and no liability for any direct, indirect or

incidental damage arising from this information or the installation of

the update package.

_____________________________________________________________________________



1. Problem Description



  Several buffer overflows have been found in proftpd which have been

  verified to be exploitable from an remote attacker.



  The fixing and finding of new holes is going on for over 2 weeks now,

  and there is no end in sight.



  Even with all known fixes, proftpd is still vulnerable to remote

  exploitation.



2. Impact



  A remote attacker can gain root access to the system from remote.



3. Solution



  Deactivate, or better, deinstall the proftpd package.



  Proftpd will be dropped from current distributions until there can be

  put trust in this package.



  We will provide an update, once a completely fixed version is out.



  Until then, please use a secure ftpd server.

  If you only need to provide readonly anonymous ftp access, we encourage

  you to get the anon-ftpd from Bernstein from

  ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/www/anonftpd.html

  Otherwise, we recommend to run the stock ftpd which comes by default with

  SuSE and is derived from OpenBSD.



______________________________________________________________________________



Webpage for patches:

  http://www.suse.de/patches/index.html



or try the following web pages for a list of mirrors:

  http://www.suse.de/ftp.html

  http://www.suse.com/ftp_new.html



______________________________________________________________________________



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______________________________________________________________________________



If you want to report *NEW* security bugs in the SuSE Linux Distribution

please send an email to security@suse.de or call our support line.

You may use pgp with the public key below to ensure confidentiality.

______________________________________________________________________________



  This information is provided freely to everyone interested and may

  be redistributed provided that it is not altered in any way.



Type Bits/KeyID    Date       User ID

pub  2048/3D25D3D9 1999/03/06 SuSE Security Team <security@suse.de>