Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 136300
CAN-2004-0977 temporary file vulnerabilities in make_oidjoins_check script
Last modified: 2013-07-02 23:02:27 EDT
On September 10th 2004, Trustix shared some temporary file vulnerabilities with vendor-sec. After some refinement these were made public on Sep30. These are minor issues (impact: LOW) and therefore should be fixed in future updates, but don't deserve their own security advisory. Temporary file vulnerability in make_oidjoins_check script. Patch attached. Part of rh-postgresql-contrib therefore affects RHEL3 This issue does not affect the RHEL2.1 postgresql packages which did not contain this script.
Created attachment 105429 [details] tempfile patch from vendor-sec
What we have here is an unportable solution to a non-problem. make_oidjoins_check is never run by users, and in any case the worst someone could do is screw up the regression test script it creates, which would certainly be noticed before the script got used in production. I might be more excited about applying this if the proposed mktemp call hadn't failed outright on the system that I would actually be likely to be running make_oidjoins_check on for future PG releases; but as is, the patch is unacceptable upstream, and I don't think it's worth the trouble to try to develop a portable invocation of mktemp for this. A more likely patch would be to remove the script from the RPM entirely ... it seems like a waste of space to have it there.
It certainly wouldn't ever be run as root --- it's basically a tool that is used about once per release cycle to update the oidjoins regression test script to match the system catalogs' foreign-key structure. Also the attacker couldn't control what was going to be written, so the vulnerability seems essentially nil to me. Taking the script out of the distro is definitely the most reasonable response.
This is repaired in rh-postgresql-7.3.8-1.
An errata has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on the solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2004-489.html