The following vulnerability in util-linux was announced (taken from http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2015/q3/423): """ If the chfn and chsh binaries (both setuid-root) from util-linux/login-utils are compiled WITHOUT libuser support, they eventually call mkostemp(localtmp, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_CLOEXEC); where localtmp is "/etc/%s.XXXXXX" and %s is __progname (i.e., argv[0]'s basename). An attacker could repeatedly execve chfn as "ld.so" until mkostemp() creates "/etc/ld.so.preload" (after a few days, in our tests). This particular example doesn't actually work, because "preload" is 7 chars and "XXXXXX" is 6 chars, but it seems there are other interesting possibilities, like "/etc/rc.status" and "/etc/krb5.keytab". The impact of this vulnerability is probably very limited: most Linux distributions ship either the chfn/chsh binaries from the shadow-utils (NOT the login-utils ones), or the login-utils ones but WITH libuser support. """ Upstream patch: https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/commit/bde91c85bdc77975155058276f99d2e0f5eab5a9
Created util-linux tracking bugs for this issue: Affects: fedora-all [bug 1256751]
We're not affected. Our binaries do not use the mkostemp function. Statement: This issue did not affect the versions of util-linux as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 7. This issue does not affect the versions of util-linux-ng as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.