Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 694873
CVE-2011-1658 glibc: ld.so insecure handling of privileged programs' RPATHs with $ORIGIN
Last modified: 2016-02-04 01:47:17 EST
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures assigned an identifier CVE-2011-1658 to the following vulnerability: Name: CVE-2011-1658 URL: http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2011-1658 Assigned: 20110408 Reference: http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12393 Reference: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=667974 ld.so in the GNU C Library (aka glibc or libc6) 2.13 and earlier expands the $ORIGIN dynamic string token when RPATH is composed entirely of this token, which might allow local users to gain privileges by creating a hard link in an arbitrary directory to a (1) setuid or (2) setgid program with this RPATH value, and then executing the program with a crafted value for the LD_PRELOAD environment variable, a different vulnerability than CVE-2010-3847 and CVE-2011-0536. NOTE: it is not expected that any standard operating-system distribution would ship an applicable setuid or setgid program.
This problem is not new, it has existed for a long time and was mentioned in the discussions of CVE-2010-3847 and CVE-2011-0536 already (see e.g. bug #667974, comment #9). It's not clear to me why the CVE description was created in a way that only mentions one of the problems documented in the upstream bug report. Patches described in the upstream bug: http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12393#c1 were added to the glibc packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6 as part of the fixes for CVE-2011-0536/CVE-2010-3847 in the following errata: https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-0412.html https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-0413.html We have rated this issue as having low security impact. This can only be exploited via setuid or setgid binary with $ORIGIN in RPATH. There is no such binary shipped in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are not aware of any other vendor including such binary in their distribution. As Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is in the maintenance phase of its life cycle and the issue has very limited impact, we currently do not plan to address this flaw in RHEL-4 glibc packages.