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Berkeley Sendmail Starvation and Overflow Vulnerabilities

This description was taken from the CERT advisory.

There are two vulnerabilities in all versions of sendmail up to and including sendmail 8.7.5. The first vulnerability is a resource starvation problem and the second is a buffer overflow problem.

Resource Starvation

When email is forwarded to a program using a .forward file or an :include: statement within a .forward or alias file, that program is executed as the owner of the .forward file or the file referenced by the :include: statement. Similarly, if email is forwarded to a file, that file is opened as the owner of the .forward file or the file referenced by the :include: statement. The file owner is called the "controlling user."

If the message cannot be delivered immediately, the name of the controlling user is written into the queue file along with the other delivery information so that the appropriate permissions can be acquired when the mail queue is processed.

Only the name of the controlling user is written in the queue file. This name is derived by calling the system routine getpwuid(3) on the user id of the file owner. If getpwuid fails, the sendmail default user (defined by the DefaultUser option in 8.7 and by the "u" and "g" options in older releases) is assumed.

In some cases, the system can be forced into resource starvation, thus forcing getpwuid(3) to fail even though an entry exists in /etc/passwd corresponding to that uid. Since getpwuid has no way of portably returning an error meaning "resource failure" as distinct from "user id not found," sendmail has no way of distinguishing between these cases; it assumes that the uid is unknown and falls back to the default user.

By starving sendmail of specific resources, sendmail will create files owned by the default user. Once created, these files can be used to access other files owned by the default user. In addition, these files owned by the default user can be used to leverage access to other privileged users on the system.

Buffer Overflows

There are several buffer overflows present in sendmail version 8.7.5 and earlier. Some of the buffer overflows could result in local users gaining unauthorized root access.

Significant work has been done on sendmail version 8.8 (now in beta test) to eliminate the problem, and the code changes originally planned for 8.8 have been backported to 8.7.6 to address these vulnerabilities.