Bug 638384 (CVE-2010-3357)

Summary: CVE-2010-3357 gnome-subtitles: insecure library loading vulnerability
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: Vincent Danen <vdanen>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status: CLOSED ERRATA QA Contact:
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: unspecifiedCC: belegdol, mail
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2010-11-01 07:34:59 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Bug Depends On: 638385    
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Description Vincent Danen 2010-09-28 22:06:28 UTC 
Raphael Geissert conducted a review of various packages in Debian and found that gnome-subtitles contained a script that could be abused by an attacker to execute arbitrary code [1].

The vulnerability is due to an insecure change to LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and environment variable used by ld.so(8) to look for libraries in directories other than the standard paths.  When there is an empty item in the colon-separated list of directories in LD_LIBRARY_PATH, ld.so(8) treats it as a '.' (current working directory).  If the given script is executed from a directory where a local attacker could write files, there is a chance for exploitation.

In Fedora, /usr/bin/gnome-subtitles re-sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH insecurely:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$libdir/gnome-subtitles:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

A solution is to patch the script to test if $LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set first before attempting to modify it:

if [ -z ${LD_LIBRARY_PATH} ]; then
    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/foo
else
    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/foo:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
fi

This issue has been assigned the name CVE-2010-3357.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=598289
Comment 1 Vincent Danen 2010-09-28 22:07:30 UTC 
Created gnome-subtitles tracking bugs for this issue

Affects: fedora-all [bug 638385]
Comment 2 Tomas Hoger 2010-09-29 07:44:22 UTC 
This one-liner should work as an alternative to if-else-fi fix:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/foo${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
Comment 3 Pedro Castro 2010-10-01 23:37:03 UTC 
This bug has been fixed in the development version with Tomas' one-liner:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$libdir/gnome-subtitles${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH}