Bug 460435 (CVE-2008-4191)

Summary: CVE-2008-4191 emacspeak: Insecure auxiliary /tmp file usage (symlink attack possible)
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: Jan Lieskovsky <jlieskov>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: unspecifiedCC: bressers, petersen
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: 2015-02-17 15:27:45 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: 463819, 463820, 463821    
Bug Blocks:    

Description Jan Lieskovsky 2008-08-28 09:57:09 UTC 
The emacspeak package as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 and 5
and as shipped within Fedora releases 8, 9 and 10 is prone to the symlink
attack.

Affected file: /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/emacspeak/etc/extract-table.pl

Relevant part of the code:

 44 my $output = new FileHandle (">  /tmp/$task.csv");
 45 my ($ts,$row);
 46 foreach $ts ($te->table_states) {
 47           foreach $row ($ts->rows) {
 48              $output->print ( join(',', @$row), "\n");
 49           }
 50         }
 51 
 52 $output->close();


Explanation:

A malicious user could precreate a symlink pointing to the file /tmp/extract-table.csv, then run the 'emacspeak' command with such
a syntax, that would call the 'extract-table.pl' script. This could
allow him to destroy the target of the symlink.

References:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=496374 (part for emacspeak)
Comment 4 Vincent Danen 2015-02-17 15:27:45 UTC 
Statement:

Red Hat Product Security has rated this issue as having Low security impact. This issue is not currently planned to be addressed in future updates. For additional information, refer to the Issue Severity Classification: https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/.