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-
- Hello Everyone. I would like to announce that I have discovered what appears
- to be a rather serious bug in the Pine Mail Client, that allows a user of
- Pine to overwrite ANY file, with ANY permissions or ownerships in their home
- directory (including sub-directorys).
-
- This bug can be used to overwrite a protected login script, or to overwrite
- a resource file (like .pinerc). This can be of serious concern to those that
- use Pine as a shell for users, as this can allow them to modify or create
- files that could be used to gain shell access. (Such as .rhosts, .forward,
- etc.)
-
- All that is required to exploit this apparent bug is to open up a message
- attachment using the Pine attachment viewer, and save the attachment.
- If you want to overwrite ANY file anywhere in the users home directory,
- just enter the file name and select overwrite. This does not work outside
- of the users home directory BTW.
-
- The interesting thing about this is that it appears to completly bypass any
- filesystem level security (permissions, owner, etc.). Also, when pine
- overwrites the file it sets the mode to 622 (-rw-r--r--) and the owner to
- the current user. (The pine executable IS NOT setuid root.)
-
- I have verified this behavior on Pine version 3.95 & 3.96 on Linux systems.
- So far I have not been able to find a version or system that is not
- susceptable.
-
- I do not currently know of any patch or fix for this behavior.
-
-
-