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=========================================================== Ubuntu Security Notice USN-59-1 January 10, 2005 mailman vulnerabilities CAN-2004-1177, http://bugs.debian.org/285839 =========================================================== A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases: Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog) The following packages are affected: mailman The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version 2.1.5-1ubuntu2.2. In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes. Details follow: Florian Weimer discovered a cross-site scripting vulnerability in mailman's automatically generated error messages. An attacker could craft an URL containing JavaScript (or other content embedded into HTML) which triggered a mailman error page. When an unsuspecting user followed this URL, the malicious content was copied unmodified to the error page and executed in the context of this page. Juha-Matti Tapio discovered an information disclosure in the private rosters management. Everybody could check whether a specified email address was subscribed to a private mailing list by looking at the error message. This bug was Ubuntu/Debian specific. Important note: There is currently another known vulnerability: when an user subscribes to a mailing list without choosing a password, mailman automatically generates one. However, there are only about 5 million different possible passwords which allows brute force attacks. A different password generation algorithm already exists, but is currently too immature to be put into a stable release security update. Therefore it is advisable to always explicitly choose a password for subscriptions, at least until this gets fixed in Warty Warthog. See https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/4892 for details.