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Vixie Cron MAILTO Sendmail Vulnerability

Failure by the vixie cron daemon from validating the contents of a user supplied environment variable allow a malicious users to pass arbitrary command line arguments to sendmail while running as the root user.

The cron daemon uses the cron_popen function to send email to the user that queue commands for execution by cron. The user can set a MAILTO environment variable before calling cron to have it send the email to a different address. The cron daemon passes the contents of this environment variable to sendmail via the command line while executing as the root user. This allow a local malicious user to obtain root access.