Raphael Geissert conducted a review of various packages in Debian and found that torcs contained numerous scripts that could be abused by an attacker to execute arbitrary code [1]. The vulnerability is due to an insecure change to LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and environment variable used by ld.so(8) to look for libraries in directories other than the standard paths. When there is an empty item in the colon-separated list of directories in LD_LIBRARY_PATH, ld.so(8) treats it as a '.' (current working directory). If the given script is executed from a directory where a local attacker could write files, there is a chance for exploitation. In Fedora, /usr/bin/{acc,nfs2ac,nfsperf,texmapper,torcs,trackgen} all re-set LD_LIBRARY_PATH insecurely: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$LIBDIR/lib A solution is to patch the scripts to test if $LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set first before attempting to modify it: if [ -z ${LD_LIBRARY_PATH} ]; then export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/foo else export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/foo:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH} fi This issue has been assigned the name CVE-2010-3384. [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=598306
Created torcs tracking bugs for this issue Affects: fedora-all [bug 638394]
This one-liner should work as an alternative to if-else-fi fix: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/foo${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
This was corrected in upstream torcs 1.3.2: http://torcs.sourceforge.net/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=77 Current Fedora version is 1.3.3 in F17+; F16 still ships the vulnerable 1.3.1.