The emacspeak package as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 and 5 and as shipped within Fedora releases 8, 9 and 10 is prone to the symlink attack. Affected file: /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/emacspeak/etc/extract-table.pl Relevant part of the code: 44 my $output = new FileHandle ("> /tmp/$task.csv"); 45 my ($ts,$row); 46 foreach $ts ($te->table_states) { 47 foreach $row ($ts->rows) { 48 $output->print ( join(',', @$row), "\n"); 49 } 50 } 51 52 $output->close(); Explanation: A malicious user could precreate a symlink pointing to the file /tmp/extract-table.csv, then run the 'emacspeak' command with such a syntax, that would call the 'extract-table.pl' script. This could allow him to destroy the target of the symlink. References: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=496374 (part for emacspeak)
Statement: Red Hat Product Security has rated this issue as having Low security impact. This issue is not currently planned to be addressed in future updates. For additional information, refer to the Issue Severity Classification: https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/.