The groffer script in the Groff package 1.18 and later versions, as used in Trustix Secure Linux 1.5 through 2.1, and possibly other operating systems, allows local users to overwrite files via a symlink attack on temporary files.

The Trustix Secure Linux team discovered a vulnerability in the groffer utility, part of the groff package. It created a temporary directory in an insecure way which allowed for the exploitation of a race condition to create or overwrite files the privileges of the user invoking groffer.

Likewise, similar temporary file issues were fixed in the pic2graph and eqn2graph programs which now use mktemp to create temporary files, as discovered by Javier Fernandez-Sanguino Pena.

The updated packages have been patched to correct this issue.

Recently, Trustix Secure Linux discovered a vulnerability in the groff package. The utility 'groffer' created a temporary directory in an insecure way, which allowed exploitation of a race condition to create or overwrite files with the privileges of the user invoking the program.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

The groffer script in the groff package 1.18 and later versions allows local users to overwrite files via a symlink attack on temporary files.

The remote host is affected by the vulnerability described in GLSA-200411-15 (OpenSSL, Groff: Insecure tempfile handling)

    groffer and the der_chop script create temporary files in     world-writeable directories with predictable names.
  Impact :

    A local attacker could create symbolic links in the temporary files     directory, pointing to a valid file somewhere on the filesystem. When     groffer or der_chop is executed, this would result in the file being     overwritten with the rights of the user running the utility, which     could be the root user.
  Workaround :

    There is no known workaround at this time.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
20878	Mandrake Linux Security Advisory : groff (MDKSA-2006:038)	Nessus	Mandriva Local Security Checks	low
20520	Ubuntu 4.10 : groff utility vulnerability (USN-13-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	low
18850	FreeBSD : groff -- groffer uses temporary files unsafely (169f422f-bd88-11d9-a281-02e018374e71)	Nessus	FreeBSD Local Security Checks	low
15649	GLSA-200411-15 : OpenSSL, Groff: Insecure tempfile handling	Nessus	Gentoo Local Security Checks	low

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2004-0969

medium

Tenable Plugins

low

low

low

low