Back in 2000 it was reported that a malicious ssh server could cause scp to write to arbitrary files outside of the current directory. See: http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/archive/bugtraq/2000/09/msg00499.html This is a valid behaviour of the rcp protocol. The issue was rediscovered in Mar 2004 and discussed amongst OSS vendors, with Markus Friedl from OpenBSD writing a proposed patch for this issue but warned that it needed a lot of testing: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/ssh/scp.c.diff?r1=1.113&r2=1.114
We are currently evaluating this issue; in the meantime concerned users can use sftp as an alternative way to copy files, or be careful not to scp files from untrusted hosts.
Is Red Hat still "evaluating this issue"? (I think Apple released a patch to fix this vuln on Mac OS X earlier today, for what that's worth.)
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on the solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2005-106.html
Will there be errata packages to fix this for RHEL 2.1?
The fix for RHEL2.1 is now being tracked by bug 158915