Debian Patches Holes in Nginx, Perl Module

[iulik]

Debian has released patches for a pair of security vulnerabilities in the free operating system, including a security bypass flaw in the Nginx Web server. The other vulnerability lies in a Perl module used in the OS.

The vulnerability in the HTTP: :Body Perl module could allow an attacker to run arbitrary commands on a vulnerable Debian server.

“The HTTP body multipart parser creates temporary files which preserve the suffix of the uploaded file. An attacker able to upload files to a service that uses HTTP::Body::Multipart could potentially execute commands on the server if these temporary filenames are used in subsequent commands without further checks. This update restricts the possible suffixes used for the created temporary files,” the Debian advisory says.

The second vulnerability is a bug in the Nginx Web server that enables an attacker to bypass the security restrictions in Debian. Found by Ivan Fratric of the Google security team, the vulnerability is a serious one. It “might allow an attacker to bypass security restrictions by using a specially crafted request,” Debian said in its advisory.

Users running vulnerable versions of Debian are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible.