From the
Debian Security Announce mailing list:
One year ago, we have received a report from SGI that a
vulnerability has been discovered in the seyon program which can
lead to a root compromise. Any user who can execute the seyon
program can exploit this vulnerability.
However, the license of Seyon doesn’t permit us to provide a
fix, now is the Seyon author responsive, nor do we have a patch,
nor do we know an exploit and can’t develop a fixe therefore.
We recommend you switch to minicom instead.
The maintainer of Seyon told us the following:
I notice from reading the SGI announcement that their problem is
a root exploit because of a setuid Seyon. The Seyon we ship is not
setuid, so I doubt we’ll have a serious problem.