______________________________________________________________________________

                        SuSE Security Announcement

        Package:  cron-3.0.1-75 (Vixie Cron) and previous versions
        Date:     Fri Aug 27 17:56:48 CEST 1999
        Affected: maybe all Unix operatingsystems using crond
______________________________________________________________________________

Some security holes were discovered in the package mentioned above.
Please update as soon as possible or disable the service if you are using
this software on your SuSE Linux installation(s).

Other Linux distributions or operating systems might be affected as
well, please contact your vendor for information about this issue.

Please note, that that we provide this information on as "as-is" basis only.
There is no warranty whatsoever and no liability for any direct, indirect or
incidental damage arising from this information or the installation of
the update package.
_____________________________________________________________________________

1. Problem Description

  Three security threats were found in the vixie crond, which is shipped
  with SuSE Linux.
  1)  no boundchecking on a local buffer, while copying data from MAILTO
  2)  passing invalid options to sendmail
  3)  it doesn't drop root privileges while sending acknowledge mail
      to a user

2. Impact

  1)   local root compromise by putting arbitrary code on the stack
  2/3) triggering a local denial-of-service attack by starting alot
       of sendmail daemons
       execute sendmail with options that only root could apply
       (like '-C'), which also leads to local root compromise

3. Solution

  Updated the crond package from our FTP server.

______________________________________________________________________________

Here are the md5 checksums of the upgrade packages, please verify these
before installing the new packages:

bfc9ab01fdfd36eebb3cc398bbb34c37  cron-3.0.1-84.i386.rpm (6.2)
8998dbecf020d8a6f7ba1a2885f986da  cron-3.0.1-82.i386.rpm (6.1)

______________________________________________________________________________

You will find the update on our ftp-Server:
    
Webpage for patches:
  http://www.suse.de/patches/index.html

or try the following web pages for a list of mirrors:
  http://www.suse.de/ftp.html
  
______________________________________________________________________________