What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2011-4862

• Severity: critical (CVSS 10.0 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 95.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2011-12-25 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-120

Description

Buffer overflow in libtelnet/encrypt.c in telnetd in FreeBSD 7.3 through 9.0, MIT Kerberos Version 5 Applications (aka krb5-appl) 1.0.2 and earlier, Heimdal 1.5.1 and earlier, GNU inetutils, and possibly other products allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a long encryption key, as exploited in the wild in December 2011.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 5.0, 6.0, 7.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 15, 16
• FreeBSD: from 7.3 through 9.0
• GNU inetutils: before 1.9 — fixed in 1.9
• Heimdal Software Kerberos: through 1.5.1
• MIT Krb5-Appl: through 1.0.2
• Opensuse: 11.3, 11.4
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1: 10-sp4, 11-sp1
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server: 9, 10-sp2, 10-sp3, 10-sp4, 11-sp1
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Software Development Kit: 10-sp4, 11-sp1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: GNU inetutils 1.9. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/bugtraq/2011-12/0172.html
• http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/inetutils.git/commit/?id=665f1e73cdd9b38e2d2e11b8db9958a315935592
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2012-January/071627.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2012-January/071640.html
• http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2011-December/006117.html
• http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2011-December/006118.html
• http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2011-December/006119.html
• http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2011-December/006120.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-01/msg00002.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-01/msg00004.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-01/msg00005.html
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2012-01/msg00007.html

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