Josh Bressers has reported a weakness in OpenSSH, which potentially can be exploited by malicious, local users to perform certain actions with escalated privileges.

The weakness is caused due to the insecure use of the "system()" function in scp when performing copy operations using filenames that are supplied by the user from the command line. This can be exploited to execute shell commands with privileges of the user running scp.

Successful exploitation requires that the user is e.g. tricked into using scp to copy a file with a specially crafted filename.

The weakness has been confirmed in version 4.2p1. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution
The weakness has been fixed in version 4.3p1.

Provided and/or discovered by
Josh Bressers

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
Red Hat Bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=174026

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers