CVE-2017-17520 is a vulnerability in Debian Tin
Published on December 14, 2017
tools/url_handler.pl in TIN 2.4.1 does not validate strings before launching the program specified by the BROWSER environment variable, which might allow remote attackers to conduct argument-injection attacks via a crafted URL. NOTE: a third party has reported that this is intentional behavior, because the documentation states "url_handler.pl was designed to work together with tin which only issues shell escaped absolute URLs.
Vulnerability Analysis
CVE-2017-17520 is exploitable with network access, requires user interaction. This vulnerability is considered to have a low attack complexity. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to be very high.
Weakness Type
What is an Injection Vulnerability?
The software constructs all or part of a command, data structure, or record using externally-influenced input from an upstream component, but it does not neutralize or incorrectly neutralizes special elements that could modify how it is parsed or interpreted when it is sent to a downstream component. Software has certain assumptions about what constitutes data and control respectively. It is the lack of verification of these assumptions for user-controlled input that leads to injection problems. Injection problems encompass a wide variety of issues -- all mitigated in very different ways and usually attempted in order to alter the control flow of the process. For this reason, the most effective way to discuss these weaknesses is to note the distinct features which classify them as injection weaknesses. The most important issue to note is that all injection problems share one thing in common -- i.e., they allow for the injection of control plane data into the user-controlled data plane. This means that the execution of the process may be altered by sending code in through legitimate data channels, using no other mechanism. While buffer overflows, and many other flaws, involve the use of some further issue to gain execution, injection problems need only for the data to be parsed. The most classic instantiations of this category of weakness are SQL injection and format string vulnerabilities.
CVE-2017-17520 has been classified to as an Injection vulnerability or weakness.
Products Associated with CVE-2017-17520
Want to know whenever a new CVE is published for Debian Tin? stack.watch will email you.
Exploit Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) scores estimate the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. The percentile shows you how this score compares to all other vulnerabilities.