CVE-2018-16741 — An issue was discovered in mgetty before 1

An issue was discovered in mgetty before 1.2.1. In fax/faxq-helper.c, the function do_activate() does not properly sanitize shell metacharacters to prevent command injection. It is possible to use the ||, &&, or > characters within a file created by the "faxq-help

01What is this vulnerability?

An issue was discovered in mgetty before 1.2.1. In fax/faxq-helper.c, the function do_activate() does not properly sanitize shell metacharacters to prevent command injection. It is possible to use the ||, &&, or > characters within a file created by the "faxq-helper activate <jobid>" command.

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
n	a / n/a	n/a

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2018-09-13T16:00:00.000Z
• Last modified: 2024-08-05T10:32:53.779Z

09References

• www.x41-dsec.de — https://www.x41-dsec.de/lab/advisories/x41-2018-007-mgetty
• www.debian.org — https://www.debian.org/security/2018/dsa-4291
• lists.debian.org — https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2018/09/msg00012.html