Bug 166995

Summary: CVE-2005-2494 kcheckpass privilege escalation
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Reporter: Josh Bressers <bressers>
Component: kdebaseAssignee: Than Ngo <than>
Status: CLOSED ERRATA QA Contact: Ben Levenson <benl>
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 4.0CC: bugs, laroche, security-response-team
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard: impact=low,reported=20050828,public=20050905,source=vendorsec
Fixed In Version: RHSA-2006-0582 Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2006-08-10 19:00:25 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:    
Bug Blocks: 180057, 181409    
Attachments:
Description Flags
Proposed patch from upstream none

Description Josh Bressers 2005-08-29 15:00:55 UTC 
This text was scavanged from the KDE advisory:

KDE Security Advisory: kcheckpass local root vulnerability
Original Release Date: 2008-09-05
URL: http://www.kde.org/info/security/advisory-20050905-1.txt

0. References

        CAN-2005-FIXME

1. Systems affected:

        All KDE releases starting from KDE 3.2.0 up to including
        KDE 3.4.2.


2. Overview:

        Ilja van Sprundel from suresec.org notified the KDE
        security team about a serious lock file handling error
        in kcheckpass that can, in some configurations, be used
        to gain root access.

        In order for an exploit to succeed, the directory /var/lock
        has to be writeable for a user that is allowed to invoke
        kcheckpass.


3. Impact:

        A local user can escalate its privileges to the root user.
Comment 2 Josh Bressers 2005-08-29 15:37:02 UTC 
Created attachment 118209 [details]
Proposed patch from upstream
Comment 3 Than Ngo 2005-09-01 17:29:07 UTC 
i have already committed the patch into CVS, it will be included in next  
kdebase update.
Comment 4 Mark J. Cox 2005-09-06 13:12:36 UTC 
Public via bugtraq, removing embargo -- note we don't ship anything with
/var/lock world writeable.
Comment 5 David Eisenstein 2006-02-05 07:24:42 UTC 
Hi,  I am working on this bug for Fedora Legacy.  I note for the Fedora Core 4
version of this bug (Bug #166997) that you CLOSED NOTABUG on this same issue.

Are you intending to close this also NOTABUG?  Or is it remotely possible that
a sysadmin may decide, for whatever reason, to make his or her /var/lock world
writeable?

Please let me know.  Thanks.       -David
Comment 6 Josh Bressers 2006-02-05 13:17:24 UTC 
We won't be closing this as NOTABUG.  The previous bug should have been closed
ERRATA, I'm guessing it was a simple wrong click.  We will fix this, but not
until we have a different issue to fix in kdebase.  This issue has an impact of
"LOW", which means we won't release an update just for this particular issue.

It's unlikely anyone would have their /var/lock world writeable, but it never
hurts to err on the side of caution.
Comment 10 Xiaohong Wang 2006-07-10 02:38:05 UTC 
We're relying on upstream for verification because we have no test code.
Comment 12 Red Hat Bugzilla 2006-08-10 19:00:25 UTC 
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem
described in this bug report. This report is therefore being
closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information
on the solution and/or where to find the updated files,
please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report
if the solution does not work for you.

http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2006-0582.html