Secunia Research: Opera Command Line URL Shell Command Injection

[Secunia Research <vuln () secunia com>]

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                     Secunia Research 22/11/2005

         - Opera Command Line URL Shell Command Injection -

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Table of Contents

Affected Software....................................................1
Severity.............................................................2
Description of Vulnerability.........................................3
Solution.............................................................4
Time Table...........................................................5
Credits..............................................................6
References...........................................................7
About Secunia........................................................8
Verification.........................................................9

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1) Affected Software 

Opera 8.x on Unix / Linux based environments.

Prior versions may also be affected.

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2) Severity 

Rating: Highly Critical
Impact: System access
Where:  Remote

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3) Description of Vulnerability

Secunia Research has discovered a vulnerability in Opera, which can
be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system.

The vulnerability is caused due to the shell script used to launch
Opera parsing shell commands that are enclosed within backticks in
the URL provided via the command line. This can e.g. be exploited to
execute arbitrary shell commands by tricking a user into following a
malicious link in an external application which uses Opera as the
default browser (e.g. the mail client Evolution on Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 4).

This vulnerability can only be exploited on Unix / Linux based
environments.

This vulnerability is a variant of:
http://secunia.com/SA16869

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4) Solution 

Update to version 8.51.
http://www.opera.com/download/

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5) Time Table 

22/09/2005 - Initial vendor notification.
22/09/2005 - Initial vendor reply.
22/11/2005 - Vendor released patches.
22/11/2005 - Public disclosure.

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6) Credits 

Originally discovered by:
Peter Zelezny

Discovered in Opera by:
Jakob Balle, Secunia Research

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7) References

Secunia Advisory SA16869:
http://secunia.com/advisories/16869/

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8) About Secunia 

Secunia collects, validates, assesses, and writes advisories regarding 
all the latest software vulnerabilities disclosed to the public. These 
advisories are gathered in a publicly available database at the 
Secunia website: 

http://secunia.com/

Secunia offers services to our customers enabling them to receive all 
relevant vulnerability information to their specific system 
configuration. 

Secunia offers a FREE mailing list called Secunia Security Advisories: 

http://secunia.com/secunia_security_advisories/

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9) Verification 

Please verify this advisory by visiting the Secunia website:
http://secunia.com/secunia_research/2005-57/advisory/

Complete list of vulnerability reports published by Secunia Research:
http://secunia.com/secunia_research/

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