VIR Vulnerability Intelligence Relay

CVE-2011-4862

critical
Published 2011-12-25 · Modified 2026-04-29
💬 Discuss on Community ✚ Propose mitigation
CVSS v3
—
CVSS v4 NEW
—
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
10.0

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.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
20%
Patch ETA
—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-18280 remote linux verified
NighterMan & BatchDrake · 2011-12-26

TelnetD encrypt_keyid - Function Pointer Overwrite

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.
EDB-18369 remote bsd verified
Metasploit · 2012-01-14

FreeBSD - Telnet Service Encryption Key ID Buffer Overflow (Metasploit)

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.
EDB-18368 remote linux verified
Metasploit · 2012-01-14

Linux BSD-derived Telnet Service Encryption Key ID - Remote Buffer Overflow (Metasploit)

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

Metasploit modules

auxiliary_scanner/telnet/telnet_encrypt_overflow rank 300
Telnet Service Encryption Key ID Overflow Detection
Source fetch failed: fetch_error — view the original via the link above.
exploit_freebsd/telnet/telnet_encrypt_keyid rank 500
FreeBSD Telnet Service Encryption Key ID Buffer Overflow
Source fetch failed: fetch_error — view the original via the link above.
exploit_linux/telnet/telnet_encrypt_keyid rank 500
Linux BSD-derived Telnet Service Encryption Key ID Buffer Overflow
Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

OS impact
fedora Fedora Affected 2 releases
VersionStatusFixed in
16 Affected —
15 Affected —
freebsd FreeBSD Affected 1 release
VersionStatusFixed in
— Affected —
suse SUSE Affected 5 releases
VersionStatusFixed in
11.4 Affected —
11.3 Affected —
11 Affected —
10 Affected —
9 Affected —
debian Debian Mixed 8 releases
VersionStatusFixed in
trixie Fixed 1.5.dfsg.1-1
sid Fixed 1.5.dfsg.1-1
forky Fixed 1.5.dfsg.1-1
bullseye Fixed 1.5.dfsg.1-1
bookworm Fixed 1.5.dfsg.1-1
7.0 Affected —
6.0 Affected —
5.0 Affected —

Application impact
VendorProductVersionsFixed
gnuinetutils{"endExcluding":"1.9"}1.9
heimdal_projectheimdal{"endIncluding":"1.5.1"}
mitkrb5-appl{"endIncluding":"1.0.2"}

References

CWEs

CWE-120

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.