Bug 883162 (CVE-2012-5617) - CVE-2012-5617 gksu-polkit: privilege escalation due to improper authentication settings in policykit configuration file
Summary: CVE-2012-5617 gksu-polkit: privilege escalation due to improper authenticatio...
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED ERRATA
Alias: CVE-2012-5617
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
high
high
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Red Hat Product Security
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On: 886671
Blocks: 883168
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2012-12-03 22:52 UTC by Vincent Danen
Modified: 2019-09-29 12:58 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2015-08-22 16:53:03 UTC
Embargoed:


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Description Vincent Danen 2012-12-03 22:52:57 UTC
Miroslav Trmac reported that gksu-polkit ships with an extremely permissive PolicyKit policy configuration file [1].  Because gksu-polkit allows a user to execute a program with administrative privileges, and because the default allow_active setting is "auth_self" rather than "auth_admin", any local user can use gksu-polkit to execute arbitrary programs (like a bash shell) with root privileges.

For example:

$ cat foo.sh
#! /bin/bash
id -a
# not just gksu-polkit id -a because gksu-polkit tries to interpret the -a
# this prompts for user's password only
$ gksu-polkit /home/user/foo.sh
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root) context=system_u:system_r:initrc_t:s0


[1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=users/kov/gksu-polkit.git;a=blob;f=data/org.gnome.gksu.policy;h=ff0e4187941147d4f6c7ca53ebd1757521337288;hb=HEAD

Comment 2 Vincent Danen 2012-12-12 20:42:25 UTC
Created gksu-polkit tracking bugs for this issue

Affects: fedora-18 [bug 886671]

Comment 3 Fedora Update System 2013-03-06 23:00:32 UTC
gksu-polkit-0.0.3-6.fc18 has been pushed to the Fedora 18 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

Comment 4 Vincent Danen 2013-07-23 16:23:17 UTC
This issue was not properly fixed; please see bug #987561 (CVE-2013-4161) for details.

Comment 5 Fedora Update System 2013-08-04 00:02:20 UTC
gksu-polkit-0.0.3-8.gitf8ce834c.fc19 has been pushed to the Fedora 19 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

Comment 6 Fedora Update System 2013-08-04 00:08:03 UTC
gksu-polkit-0.0.3-8.gitf8ce834c.fc18 has been pushed to the Fedora 18 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.


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