SWORD: Shell command injection

Background

SWORD is a library for Bible study software.

Description

Dan Dennison reported that the diatheke.pl script used in SWORD does not properly sanitize shell meta-characters in the “range” parameter before processing it.

Impact

A remote attacker could provide specially crafted input to a vulnerable application, possibly resulting in the remote execution of arbitrary shell commands with the privileges of the user running SWORD (generally the web server account).

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All SWORD users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=app-text/sword-1.5.8-r2"