High Availability Linux Project Heartbeat 1.2.3 allows local users to overwrite arbitrary files via a symlink attack on temporary files.

This advisory adds security support for the stable amd64 distribution.
It covers all security updates since the release of sarge, which were missing updated packages for the not yet official amd64 port. Future security advisories will include updates for this port as well.

Eric Romang reports a temporary file creation vulnerability within heartbeat. The vulnerability is caused by hard-coded temporary file usage. This can cause an attacker to create an arbitrary symlink causing the application to overwrite the symlinked file with the permissions of the user executing the application.

Eric Romang discovered that heartbeat created temporary files in an insecure manner. This could allow a symlink attack to create or overwrite arbitrary files with root privileges as soon as heartbeat is started.

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 remote host is affected by the vulnerability described in GLSA-200508-05 (Heartbeat: Insecure temporary file creation)

    Eric Romang has discovered that Heartbeat insecurely creates     temporary files with predictable filenames.
  Impact :

    A local attacker could create symbolic links in the temporary file     directory, pointing to a valid file somewhere on the filesystem. When a     vulnerable script is executed, this could lead to the file being     overwritten with the rights of the user running the affected     application.
  Workaround :

    There is no known workaround at this time.

The security update DSA 761-1 for heartbeat contained a bug which caused a regression.  This problem is corrected with this advisory.
 For completeness below please find the original advisory text :

  Eric Romang discovered several insecure temporary file creations in   heartbeat, the subsystem for High-Availability Linux.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Type	Severity
57528	Debian DSA-773-1 : amd64 - several vulnerabilities	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	Local	critical
21538	FreeBSD : heartbeat -- insecure temporary file creation vulnerability (f6447303-9ec9-11da-b410-000e0c2e438a)	Nessus	FreeBSD Local Security Checks	Local	low
20571	Ubuntu 4.10 / 5.04 : heartbeat vulnerability (USN-165-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	Local	low
19389	GLSA-200508-05 : Heartbeat: Insecure temporary file creation	Nessus	Gentoo Local Security Checks	Local	low
19224	Debian DSA-761-2 : heartbeat - insecure temporary files	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	Local	low

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2005-2231

medium

Tenable Plugins

critical

low

low

low

low