MIT notified us of kadmind RPC lib buffer overflow, uninitialized pointer. Will be public on 04 September 2007, at 14:00 US/Eastern time.

This issue has not been triaged as it may well affect recent RHEL distributions with a different severity (flaw type is likely caught by fortifysource)

The asn1decodegeneraltime function in lib/krb5/asn.1/asn1decode.c in the ASN.1 GeneralizedTime decoder in MIT Kerberos 5 (aka krb5) before 1.6.4 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via vectors involving an invalid DER encoding that triggers a free of an uninitialized pointer.

The original patch for CVE-2007-3999 in svcauthgss.c in the RPCSECGSS RPC library in MIT Kerberos 5 (krb5) 1.4 through 1.6.2, as used by the Kerberos administration daemon (kadmind) and other applications that use krb5, does not correctly check the buffer length in some environments and architectures, which might allow remote attackers to conduct a buffer overflow attack.

The RPC library in Kerberos 5 1.4 through 1.4.4, and 1.5 through 1.5.1, as used in Kerberos administration daemon (kadmind) and other products that use this library, calls an uninitialized function pointer in freed memory, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) and possibly execute arbitrary code via unspecified vectors.

The (1) ftpd and (2) ksu programs in (a) MIT Kerberos 5 (krb5) up to 1.5, and 1.4.x before 1.4.4, and (b) Heimdal 0.7.2 and earlier, do not check return codes for setuid calls, which might allow local users to gain privileges by causing setuid to fail to drop privileges. NOTE: as of 20060808, it is not known whether an exploitable attack scenario exists for these issues.

The (1) krshd and (2) v4rcp applications in (a) MIT Kerberos 5 (krb5) up to 1.5, and 1.4.x before 1.4.4, when running on Linux and AIX, and (b) Heimdal 0.7.2 and earlier, do not check return codes for setuid calls, which allows local users to gain privileges by causing setuid to fail to drop privileges using attacks such as resource exhaustion.