Bug 743752 (CVE-2011-3603)

Summary:	CVE-2011-3603 radvd: daemon would not fail on privsep_init() causing it to run with full root privileges
Product:	[Other] Security Response	Reporter:	Vincent Danen <vdanen>
Component:	vulnerability	Assignee:	Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified	CC:	jskala, security-response-team
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:	2011-10-14 09:31:21 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:	744116
Bug Blocks:

Description Vincent Danen 2011-10-05 21:47:15 UTC

The radvd daemon would not fail on privsep_init() errors, which could cause it to run with full root privileges when it should be running as an unprivileged user. (CVE-2011-3603)

This is corrected in upstream git [1], [2], [3].

[1] https://github.com/reubenhwk/radvd/commit/2c50375043186e133f15135f4c93ca964238ee60
[2] https://github.com/reubenhwk/radvd/commit/074816cd0b37aac7b3209987e6e998f0a847b275
[3] https://github.com/reubenhwk/radvd/commit/7dc53cc3b792775369bf0b2f053a3f4ed5d87e3d


Acknowledgements:

Red Hat would like to thank Vasiliy Kulikov of Openwall for reporting this issue.

Comment 4 Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2011-10-06 08:53:58 UTC

The version of radvd shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, does not have the "--singleprocess" config option, hence there is no privilege  separation. The vulnerable code privsec_init() hence does not exists and therefore they are not vulnerable.

The issue affects the version of radvd shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

This issue affects the version of radvd shipped with Fedora 14 and 15.

Comment 5 Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2011-10-07 05:32:22 UTC

Public via:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.oss.general/5973

Comment 6 Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2011-10-07 05:37:26 UTC

Created radvd tracking bugs for this issue

Affects: fedora-all [bug 744116]

Comment 8 Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2011-10-14 09:31:21 UTC

Further investigations have revealed that this is not a security flaw at all.

If privsep_init() fails, the only impact it would have is that radvd would run as a single process as radvd user (assuming "--username radvd" was used, which is the default configuration)

More information at:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.oss.general/5973/focus=6015

Comment 9 Vincent Danen 2011-10-14 17:43:17 UTC

Statement:

A failure in privsep_init() does not cause radvd to run with full root privileges when invoked with the --username option specifying an unprivileged user.  Rather it will run as a single process as the specified (unprivileged) radvd user, causing this issue to have no security impact (no unintended privilege elevation).