Synopsis:	Low: sendmail security and bug fix update
Issue date:	2011-02-16
CVE Names:	CVE-2009-4565

A flaw was found in the way sendmail handled NUL characters in the
CommonName field of X.509 certificates. An attacker able to get a
carefully-crafted certificate signed by a trusted Certificate Authority
could trick sendmail into accepting it by mistake, allowing the attacker 
to perform a man-in-the-middle attack or bypass intended client 
certificate authentication. (CVE-2009-4565)

The CVE-2009-4565 issue only affected configurations using TLS with
certificate verification and CommonName checking enabled, which is not a
typical configuration.

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* Previously, sendmail did not correctly handle mail messages that had a
long first header line. A line with more than 2048 characters was split,
causing the part of the line exceeding the limit, as well as all of the
following mail headers, to be incorrectly handled as the message body.
(BZ#499450)

* When an SMTP-sender is sending mail data to sendmail, it may spool 
that data to a file in the mail queue. It was found that, if the 
SMTP-sender stopped sending data and a timeout occurred, the file may 
have been left stalled in the mail queue, instead of being deleted. This 
update may not correct this issue for every situation and configuration. 
Refer to the Notes section for further information. (BZ#434645)

* Previously, the sendmail macro MAXHOSTNAMELEN used 64 characters as 
the limit for the hostname length. However, in some cases, it was used 
against an FQDN length, which has a maximum length of 255 characters. 
With this update, the MAXHOSTNAMELEN limit has been changed to 255. 
(BZ#485380)

After installing this update, sendmail will be restarted automatically.

Notes:
As part of the fix for BZ#434645, a script called purge-mqueue is 
shipped with this update. It is located in the /usr/share/sendmail/ 
directory. The primary purpose of this script is a one-time clean up of 
the mqueue from stalled files that were created before the installation 
of this update. By default, the script removes all files from 
/var/spool/mqueue/ that have an atime older than one month. It requires 
the tmpwatch package to be installed. If you have stalled files in your 
mqueue you can run this script or clean them manually. It is also 
possible to use this script as a cron job (for example, by copying it to 
/etc/cron.daily/), but it should not be needed in most cases, because 
this update should prevent the creation of new stalled files.

SL 4.x

     SRPMS:
sendmail-8.13.1-6.el4.src.rpm
     i386:
sendmail-8.13.1-6.el4.i386.rpm
sendmail-cf-8.13.1-6.el4.i386.rpm
sendmail-devel-8.13.1-6.el4.i386.rpm
sendmail-doc-8.13.1-6.el4.i386.rpm
     x86_64:
sendmail-8.13.1-6.el4.x86_64.rpm
sendmail-cf-8.13.1-6.el4.x86_64.rpm
sendmail-devel-8.13.1-6.el4.x86_64.rpm
sendmail-doc-8.13.1-6.el4.x86_64.rpm

-Connie Sieh
-Troy Dawson