SUSE-SA:2005:062: permissions

medium Nessus Plugin ID 20083

Synopsis

The remote host is missing a vendor-supplied security patch

Description

The remote host is missing the patch for the advisory SUSE-SA:2005:062 (permissions).


SUSE LINUX ships with three pre defined sets of permissions, 'easy', 'secure' and 'paranoid'. The chkstat program contained in the permissions package is used to set those permissions to the chosen level. Level 'easy' which is the default allows some world writeable directories. /usr/src/packages/RPMS and subdirectories is among them. To prevent users from playing tricks in there e.g. linking to /etc/shadow chkstat doesn't touch symlinks or files with an hardlink count != 1.

Stefan Nordhausen discovered a way to trick this check. To gain access to e.g. /etc/shadow a malicious user has to place a hardlink to that file at a place that is modified by chkstat. chkstat will not touch the file because it has a hardlink count of two. However, if the administrator modifies the user database the original /etc/shadow gets deleted and replaced by a new one. That means the hardlink count of the file created by the malicious user drops to one. At this point chkstat will modify the file's permissions so anyone can read it. So it's technically impossible for chkstat to modify permissions of files in world writeable directories in a secure way.

One such world writeable directoy in level 'easy' is /usr/src/packages/RPMS. Only subdirectories need to be adjusted in this case. Since normal users cannot create hard links to directories the problem can be solved by telling chkstat to not accept regular files. Another problematic directory is /var/games.
Only members of group 'games' may write to it but it's likely that games with setgid 'games' are exploitable to allow user to gain group 'games' membership.

The updated permissions package now tells chkstat when to only accept directories and no longer touches anything below /var/games to solve the described problems. On SUSE Linux 9.0 xmcd contained world writeable directories that suffered from the same problems.
Updated xmcd packages for SUSE Linux 9.0 are therefore provided as well.

We like to thank Stefan Nordhausen for pointing out the problems.

Solution

http://www.suse.de/security/advisories/2005_62_permissions.html

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 20083

File Name: suse_SA_2005_062.nasl

Version: 1.9

Agent: unix

Published: 10/24/2005

Updated: 1/14/2021

Supported Sensors: Nessus Agent, Nessus

Vulnerability Information

Required KB Items: Host/SuSE/rpm-list