Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 166995
CVE-2005-2494 kcheckpass privilege escalation
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:20 EST
This text was scavanged from the KDE advisory: KDE Security Advisory: kcheckpass local root vulnerability Original Release Date: 2008-09-05 URL: http://www.kde.org/info/security/advisory-20050905-1.txt 0. References CAN-2005-FIXME 1. Systems affected: All KDE releases starting from KDE 3.2.0 up to including KDE 3.4.2. 2. Overview: Ilja van Sprundel from suresec.org notified the KDE security team about a serious lock file handling error in kcheckpass that can, in some configurations, be used to gain root access. In order for an exploit to succeed, the directory /var/lock has to be writeable for a user that is allowed to invoke kcheckpass. 3. Impact: A local user can escalate its privileges to the root user.
Created attachment 118209 [details] Proposed patch from upstream
i have already committed the patch into CVS, it will be included in next kdebase update.
Public via bugtraq, removing embargo -- note we don't ship anything with /var/lock world writeable.
Hi, I am working on this bug for Fedora Legacy. I note for the Fedora Core 4 version of this bug (Bug #166997) that you CLOSED NOTABUG on this same issue. Are you intending to close this also NOTABUG? Or is it remotely possible that a sysadmin may decide, for whatever reason, to make his or her /var/lock world writeable? Please let me know. Thanks. -David
We won't be closing this as NOTABUG. The previous bug should have been closed ERRATA, I'm guessing it was a simple wrong click. We will fix this, but not until we have a different issue to fix in kdebase. This issue has an impact of "LOW", which means we won't release an update just for this particular issue. It's unlikely anyone would have their /var/lock world writeable, but it never hurts to err on the side of caution.
We're relying on upstream for verification because we have no test code.
An advisory 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-2006-0582.html