Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures assigned an identifier CVE-2008-1142 to the following vulnerability: rxvt 2.6.4 opens an xterm on :0 if the DISPLAY environment variable is not set, which might allow local users to hijack X11 connections. Refences: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.oss.general/122 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=469296 http://secunia.com/advisories/29576
Confirmed on rxvt-2.7.10-14.fc8. This issue is generally considered to have a very low security impact. See discussion on the oss-security mailing list. http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2008/03/04/1 http://marc.info/?l=oss-security&m=120464342901584&w=4 http://marc.info/?l=oss-security&m=120483883801309&w=4 It may still be worth changing / removing this unsafe default behavior in Rawhide for future versions of Fedora. Possible patch attached in the linked Debian bug report.
I agree that this is very low profile... I will see to push upgrades for EPEL and rawhide so...
This issue does not affect Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, or 5. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this issue as having low security impact. Due to the minimal security consequences of this issue, we do not intend to fix this in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1. More information regarding issue severity can be found here: http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/