I was running a security scanner (nessus) on my webserver tonight, and it came back with port 8021 having an ftp server which "closes the connection when USER, PASS, or HELP is given with a too long argument." It says "This is probably due to a buffer overflow" Is this a false positive? Or is this something to actually be concerned about?
Because the FTP server code is in Python, the chances of this being a real classic "buffer overflow" (of the sort that can start to overwrite unintended memory) is slim (I expect that the worst you could do is send something so long that it consumes all available memory and causes Python to raise a MemoryError). We should look into the handling of those commands though. I don't manage the FTP code so I don't have enough deep Zen to know what the "correct" behavior is, but it seems that if it's giving a false positive then something is probably not being handled totally correctly. Can you make an post in the Collector about this so that it doesn't get lost in the flow of the list? Thanks! Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com