USN-2440-1: Mutt vulnerability

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-2440-1

11th December, 2014

mutt vulnerability

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its
derivatives:

  • Ubuntu 14.10
  • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Summary

The mutt mail client could be made to crash if it opened a specially
crafted email.

Software description

  • mutt
    – text-based mailreader supporting MIME, GPG, PGP and threading

Details

Jakub Wilk discovered that the write_one_header function in mutt
did not properly handle newline characters at the beginning of a
header. An attacker could specially craft an email to cause mutt to
crash, resulting in a denial of service.

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following
package version:

Ubuntu 14.10:
mutt-patched

1.5.23-1.1ubuntu0.2
mutt

1.5.23-1.1ubuntu0.2
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS:
mutt-patched

1.5.21-6.4ubuntu2.1
mutt

1.5.21-6.4ubuntu2.1
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS:
mutt-patched

1.5.21-5ubuntu2.2
mutt

1.5.21-5ubuntu2.2
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS:
mutt-patched

1.5.20-7ubuntu1.3
mutt

1.5.20-7ubuntu1.3

To update your system, please follow these instructions:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

After a standard system update you need to restart any running
instances of mutt to make all the necessary changes.

References

CVE-2014-9116

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