Bug 883162 (CVE-2012-5617)

Summary:	CVE-2012-5617 gksu-polkit: privilege escalation due to improper authentication settings in policykit configuration file
Product:	[Other] Security Response	Reporter:	Vincent Danen <vdanen>
Component:	vulnerability	Assignee:	Red Hat Product Security <security-response-team>
Status:	CLOSED ERRATA	QA Contact:
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	high
Version:	unspecified	CC:	bressers, mitr, 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:	2015-08-22 16:53:03 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:	886671
Bug Blocks:	883168

Description Vincent Danen 2012-12-03 22:52:57 UTC

Miroslav Trmac reported that gksu-polkit ships with an extremely permissive PolicyKit policy configuration file [1].  Because gksu-polkit allows a user to execute a program with administrative privileges, and because the default allow_active setting is "auth_self" rather than "auth_admin", any local user can use gksu-polkit to execute arbitrary programs (like a bash shell) with root privileges.

For example:

$ cat foo.sh
#! /bin/bash
id -a
# not just gksu-polkit id -a because gksu-polkit tries to interpret the -a
# this prompts for user's password only
$ gksu-polkit /home/user/foo.sh
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root) context=system_u:system_r:initrc_t:s0


[1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=users/kov/gksu-polkit.git;a=blob;f=data/org.gnome.gksu.policy;h=ff0e4187941147d4f6c7ca53ebd1757521337288;hb=HEAD

Comment 2 Vincent Danen 2012-12-12 20:42:25 UTC

Created gksu-polkit tracking bugs for this issue

Affects: fedora-18 [bug 886671]

Comment 3 Fedora Update System 2013-03-06 23:00:32 UTC

gksu-polkit-0.0.3-6.fc18 has been pushed to the Fedora 18 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

Comment 4 Vincent Danen 2013-07-23 16:23:17 UTC

This issue was not properly fixed; please see bug #987561 (CVE-2013-4161) for details.

Comment 5 Fedora Update System 2013-08-04 00:02:20 UTC

gksu-polkit-0.0.3-8.gitf8ce834c.fc19 has been pushed to the Fedora 19 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

Comment 6 Fedora Update System 2013-08-04 00:08:03 UTC

gksu-polkit-0.0.3-8.gitf8ce834c.fc18 has been pushed to the Fedora 18 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.