Bug 1292432 (CVE-2015-1336)

Summary:	CVE-2015-1336 man-db: TOCTOU bug when processing catman pages
Product:	[Other] Security Response	Reporter:	Martin Prpič <mprpic>
Component:	vulnerability	Assignee:	Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified	CC:	anemec, cjwatson, jchaloup, nforro
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Security
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2016-06-07 06:22:58 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:	1292433
Bug Blocks:	1292434

Description Martin Prpič 2015-12-17 12:49:01 UTC

The following flaw was found in man-db:

The daily mandb cleanup job for old catman pages changes the permissions of all non-man files to user man.

Originally filed against Ubuntu:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/man-db/+bug/1482786

External References:

http://www.halfdog.net/Security/2015/MandbSymlinkLocalRootPrivilegeEscalation/

Comment 1 Martin Prpič 2015-12-17 12:49:30 UTC

Created man-db tracking bugs for this issue:

Affects: fedora-all [bug 1292433]

Comment 2 Nikola Forró 2016-01-04 13:26:06 UTC

Hello,

It appears to me that Fedora and RHEL7 man-db packages are not affected by this, since there is no cleanup job for old catman pages there:
http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/man-db.git/tree/man-db.crondaily?h=f23

Comment 3 Doran Moppert 2016-06-07 06:15:54 UTC

Nikola's comment above is correct:  man-db in rhel and fedora are not
affected.  The man-db crontab in both doesn't chown thus lacks the
TOCTOU issue, plus (at least on rhel) /var/cache/man lacks the setgid
bit which makes the other part of this attack possible.