Software Update: Samba 3.0.2

Samba provides seamless integration of file and print services for SMB and CIFS clients. This makes it possible, for example, to share files stored in a Unix environment via a network with computers that use the Windows operating system. Version 3.0.2 was recently released and the changes can be read in the changelog† The release notes let us know the following:

This is the latest stable release of Samba. This is the version that all production Samba servers should be running for all current bug fixes.

It has been confirmed that previous versions of Samba 3.0 are susceptible to a password initialization bug that could grant an attacker unauthorized access to a user account created by the mksmbpasswd.sh shell script.

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CAN-2004-0082 to this issue.

Samba administrators not wishing to upgrade to the current version should download the 3.0.2 release, build the pdbedit tool, and run

root# pdbedit-3.0.2 –force-initialized-passwords

This will disable all accounts not possessing a valid password (eg the password field has been set a string of X’s).

Samba servers running 3.0.2 are not vulnerable to this bug regardless of whether or not pdbedit has been used to sanitize the passdb backend.

Some of the more visible bugs in 3.0.1 addressed in the 3.0.2 release include:

• Joining a Samba domain from Pre-SP2 Windows 2000 clients.
• Logging onto a Samba domain from Windows XP clients.
• Problems with the %U and %u smb.conf variables in relation to Windows 9x/ME clients.
• Kerberos failures due to an invalid in memory keytab detection test.
• Updates to the ntlm_auth tool.
• Fixes for various SMB signing errors.
• Better separation of WINS and DNS queries for domain controllers.
• Issues with nss_winbind FreeBSD and Solaris.
• Several crash bugs in smbd and winbindd.
• Output formatting fixes for smbclient for better compatibility with scripts based on the 2.2 version.