XChat: malformed dcc send request denial of service — GLSA 200312-06

A bug in XChat could allow malformed dcc send requests to cause a denial of service.

Affected packages

Package 	net-irc/xchat on all architectures
Affected versions 	= 2.0.6
Unaffected versions 	>= 2.0.6-r1

Background

XChat is a multiplatform IRC client.

Description

There is a remotely exploitable bug in XChat 2.0.6 that could lead to a denial of service attack. Gentoo wishes to thank lloydbates for discovering this bug, as well as jcdutton and rac for submitting patches to fix the bug.

Impact

A malformed DCC packet sent by a remote attacker can cause XChat to crash.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

For Gentoo users, xchat-2.0.6 was marked ~arch (unstable) for most architectures. Since it was never marked as stable in the portage tree, only xchat users who have explictly added the unstable keyword to ACCEPT_KEYWORDS are affected. Users may updated affected machines to the patched version of xchat using the following commands:

 # emerge sync
 # emerge -pv '>=net-irc/xchat-2.0.6-r1'
 # emerge '>=net-irc/xchat-2.0.6-r1'
 # emerge clean

This assumes that users are running with ACCEPT_KEYWORDS enabled for their architecture.
References

    XChat Announcement