From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020623 Debian/1.0.0-0.woody.1 Description of problem: passwd chokes and segfaults on a user where a field is lacking in /etc/passwd. I discovered this through a long and complicated process involving sed, regexps, ftp logins, and renamed homedirs, but I've reproduced it very simply as in "Steps to reproduce". Additionally I would have thought vipw would have caught that, but that was an impression I retained from OpenBSD where vipw does a consistency check on the file before install. I don't see how this could be a security problem (adding a colon too many does not seem to have any ill effects, except the ones expected from field displacement, otherwise one could have looked around a bit) but I don't like the very idea of /usr/bin/passwd segfaulting. Not reproducible on Debian 3.0. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): passwd-0.67-3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Edit /etc/passwd (I used vipw). Remove one of the two colons around an empty real name field of a valid existing user, so one colon and one field less in the file. Exit vipw, not modifying shadow. Execute `passwd user` in order to set a password, where user is the one that has one colon less (other users are unaffected). Actual Results: # passwd squid Changing password for user squid. Segmentation fault Expected Results: passwd should have output an error. I see no appropriate error messages in the binary. Additional info: The affected user cannot login, at least not using vsFTPd. No special error message in the logs.
Can't reproduce on FC3 - passwd now reports Authentication token manipulation error If you still can reproduce the segfault on a current Fedora/RHEL distribution, please reopen.
I confirm that I cannot reproduce on FC3.