An issue was discovered in KTextEditor 5.34.0 through 5.45.0. Insecure handling of temporary files in the KTextEditor's kauth_ktexteditor_helper service (as utilized in the Kate text editor) can allow other unprivileged users on the local system to gain root privileges. The attack occurs when one user (who has an unprivileged account but is also able to authenticate as root) writes a text file using Kate into a directory owned by a another unprivileged user. The latter unprivileged user conducts a symlink attack to achieve privilege escalation. References: http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2018/04/24/1
Created kf5-ktexteditor tracking bugs for this issue: Affects: fedora-all [bug 1572161] Affects: epel-all [bug 1572162]
Fix under review https://phabricator.kde.org/D12513
Fix was released as part of kde frameworks 5.48 which landed in all fedora releases. f27: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2018-2bb229d1b3 f28: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2018-697c1e9b44 and kde frameworks 5.50 released for epel7: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2018-c4ee248d8a