Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in Swift, the Openstack object storage. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following problems: CVE-2013-2161 Alex Gaynor from Rackspace reported a vulnerability in XML handling within Swift account servers. Account strings were unescaped in xml listings, and an attacker could potentially generate unparsable or arbitrary XML responses which may be used to leverage other vulnerabilities in the calling software. CVE-2013-4155 Peter Portante from Red Hat reported a vulnerability in Swift. By issuing requests with an old X-Timestamp value, an authenticated attacker can fill an object server with superfluous object tombstones, which may significantly slow down subsequent requests to that object server, facilitating a Denial of Service attack against Swift clusters.

For the stable distribution (wheezy), these problems have been fixed in version 1.4.8-2+deb7u1. For the unstable distribution (sid), these problems have been fixed in version 1.8.0-6. We recommend that you upgrade your swift packages.

OpenStack Object Storage (code-named Swift) is open source software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of standardized servers to store petabytes of accessible data. It is not a file system or real-time data storage system, but rather a long-term storage system for a more permanent type of static data that can be retrieved, leveraged, and then updated if necessary. Primary examples of data that best fit this type of storage model are virtual machine images, photo storage, email storage and backup archiving. Having no central 'brain' or master point of control provides greater scalability, redundancy and permanence.

swift on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

• http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2737.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25