14 DAY TRIAL // The Samba development team has announced earlier today, February 23, the immediate availability for download of Samba 4.1.17, a security release that addresses the CVE-2015-0240 security vulnerability related to an unexpected code execution in Samba daemon (smbd).
The CVE-2015-0240 security vulnerability fixed in Samba 4.1.17 affects all versions of the Samba software, starting with the oldest supported stable release, version 3.5.0, and ending with the current development version, 4.2.0 Release Candidate (RC) 4.
It was discovered that a malicious client was able to send some packets that could free memory in a consecutive anonymous netlogon packet, leading to execution of random code. Of course, root privileges are required for this to work. This has now been fixed in Samba 4.1.17.
In addition, CVE-2015-0240 included a talloc problem related to an raw stack pointer in the netlogon server, which may lead to a security vulnerability. The issue has been fixed by Jeremy Allison. Another issue has been discovered and fixed by Andreas Schneider, making sure that a NULL pointer will not be dereferenced.
As usual, all users of Samba 3.5.0 or higher are urged to update as soon as version 4.1.17 is available in the main software repositories of their Linux kernel-based operating systems. You can also download the Samba 4.1.17 source package right now from Softpedia.