An old Debian bug report (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=259987) indicates that some bash completions fail to properly quote or escape special characters like ' and &. Most bash completions are escaped fine, but certain ones (such as aspell) do not. An example: $ touch "foo&echo bar" $ aspell check fo<tab>o&echo bar [1] 9071 bar Error: Could not open the file "foo" for reading $ touch "bar'foo" $ aspell check bar<tab>'foo > $ ls bar<tab>' foo bar'foo The Debian report has an updated bash_completion file that corrects this. The end result is that: $ aspell check fo<tab>o\&echo \bar $ aspell check bar<tab>'foo This does not affect all completions, just certain ones (aspell is one example, cdrecord is another one).
Created attachment 337024 [details] updated bash_completion from Debian BTS This updated bash_completion file corrects the problems noted with aspell and cdrecord. There are quite a number of other fixes/changes to the file as well that could fix similar situations with other commands.
We have an even newer upstream snapshot available in Rawhide at the moment. I'm aware that it indeed contains quite a few fixes (I'm an upstream project member), but even though the snapshots have been good for a while, I've been waiting for a "real" upstream release instead of shipping the snapshot as updates for released distro versions. Do you think this issue is important enough so that the snapshot should be pushed to released Fedora and EPEL releases already now? I think the next real upstream release is not too far away.
No, I don't think this is so urgent that it can't wait a bit (the original Debian report is from back in 2004). If the upstream release is months away I might say to do something now, but if it's in a relatively sane timeframe this can wait. It's pretty low impact.
bash-completion-1.0-2.fc10 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 10. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/bash-completion-1.0-2.fc10
bash-completion-1.0-2.fc9 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 9. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/bash-completion-1.0-2.fc9
bash-completion-1.0-2.fc10 has been pushed to the Fedora 10 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
bash-completion-1.0-2.fc9 has been pushed to the Fedora 9 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
Is there a CVE # for this?
(In reply to comment #8) > Is there a CVE # for this? I'm not aware of one.