Leon Juranic discovered a buffer overflow related to the getpass(3) library function in calife, a program which provides super user privileges to specific users. A local attacker could potentially exploit this vulnerability, given knowledge of a local user's password and the presence of at least one entry in /etc/calife.auth, to execute arbitrary code with root privileges.
For the current stable distribution (woody) this problem has been fixed in version 2.8.4c-1woody1.
For the unstable distribution (sid) this problem has been fixed in version 2.8.6-1.
We recommend that you update your calife package.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.