Bug 441462 (CVE-2008-1142)

Summary:	CVE-2008-1142 rxvt: unsafe defaulting to using :0 when DISPLAY is unset
Product:	[Other] Security Response	Reporter:	Tomas Hoger <thoger>
Component:	vulnerability	Assignee:	Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	unspecified	CC:	andreas.bierfert, harald
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Security
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
URL:	http://nvd.nist.gov/nvd.cfm?cvename=CVE-2008-1142
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2010-12-23 16:34:54 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:

Description Tomas Hoger 2008-04-08 08:40:35 UTC

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures assigned an identifier CVE-2008-1142 to the following vulnerability:

rxvt 2.6.4 opens an xterm on :0 if the DISPLAY environment variable is not set, which might allow local users to hijack X11 connections.

Refences:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.oss.general/122
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=469296
http://secunia.com/advisories/29576

Comment 1 Tomas Hoger 2008-04-08 08:42:12 UTC

Confirmed on rxvt-2.7.10-14.fc8.

This issue is generally considered to have a very low security impact.  See
discussion on the oss-security mailing list.
  http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2008/03/04/1
  http://marc.info/?l=oss-security&m=120464342901584&w=4
  http://marc.info/?l=oss-security&m=120483883801309&w=4

It may still be worth changing / removing this unsafe default behavior in
Rawhide for future versions of Fedora.

Possible patch attached in the linked Debian bug report.

Comment 2 Andreas Bierfert 2008-04-08 08:55:28 UTC

I agree that this is very low profile... I will see to push upgrades for EPEL
and rawhide so...

Comment 3 Josh Bressers 2008-04-14 18:11:35 UTC

This issue does not affect Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, or 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this issue as having low security
impact.  Due to the minimal security consequences of this issue, we do not
intend to fix this in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1.  More information regarding
issue severity can be found here:
http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/