Bug 415311 (CVE-2007-5894)

Summary: CVE-2007-5894 krb5: ftpd - use of uninitialized variables
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: Tomas Hoger <thoger>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact:
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: unspecifiedCC: nalin
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
URL: http://nvd.nist.gov/nvd.cfm?cvename=CVE-2007-5894
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2007-12-14 09:38:29 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Description Tomas Hoger 2007-12-07 08:33:09 UTC 
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures assigned an identifier CVE-2007-5894 to the following vulnerability:

The reply function in ftpd.c in the gssftp ftpd in MIT Kerberos 5 (krb5) does not initialize the length variable when auth_type has a certain value, which has unknown impact and remote authenticated attack vectors.  NOTE: the original disclosure misidentifies the conditions under which the uninitialized variable is used.

References:

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199205
Comment 1 Mark J. Cox 2007-12-14 09:38:29 UTC 
http://marc.info/?l=full-disclosure&m=119743235325151&w=2

MIT say:

CVE-2007-5894
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199205

This is not a vulnerability, and only a stylistic bug.  The alleged
vulnerability consists of reading an uninitialized variable, "length",
in the reply() function in src/appl/gssftp/ftpd/ftpd.c.

  1878                  /* Other auth types go here ... */
  1879                  if (length >= sizeof(in) / 4 * 3) {
  1880                          syslog(LOG_ERR, "input to radix_encode too long");
  1881                          fputs(in, stdout);
  1882                  } else if ((kerror = radix_encode(out, in, &length, 0))) {
  1883                          syslog(LOG_ERR, "Couldn't encode reply (%s)",
  1884                                          radix_error(kerror));
  1885                          fputs(in,stdout);

The "length" variable is only uninitialized if "auth_type" is neither
the "KERBEROS_V4" nor "GSSAPI"; this condition cannot occur in the
unmodified source code.  While the remote user can set the string in
"auth_type", this may only occur by way of the auth_data() function,
which will only set "auth_type" if it exactly matches one of the
aforementioned two strings.