suPHP before 0.6.3 allows local users to gain privileges via (1) a race condition that involves multiple symlink changes to point a file owned by a different user, or (2) a symlink to the directory of a different user, which is used to determine privileges.

It was discovered that suphp, an Apache module to run PHP scripts with owner permissions handles symlinks insecurely, which may lead to privilege escalation by local users.

Multiple local privilege escalation are found in the symlink verification code. An attacker may use it to run a PHP script with the victim's privilege. This attack is a little harder when suphp operates in paranoid mode. For suphp that runs in owner mode which is the default in ports, immediate upgrade to latest version is advised.

This update is a security update fixing two local privilege escalation problems. mod_suphp 0.6.2 contains two race condition regarding symlink checks. Using this attack vector a local attacker has the ability of changing symlinks in the timeframe between the security check and the php execution itself, leading suphp to execute code as another local user. These have been fixed in the 0.6.3 update with no further code changes being present making a backport of the security fix unnecessary.

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

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
32005	Debian DSA-1550-1 : suphp - programming error	Nessus	Debian Local Security Checks	medium
31833	FreeBSD : suphp -- multiple local privilege escalation vulnerabilities (fb672330-02db-11dd-bd06-0017319806e7)	Nessus	FreeBSD Local Security Checks	medium
31748	Fedora 8 : mod_suphp-0.6.3-1.fc8 (2008-2868)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	medium
31743	Fedora 7 : mod_suphp-0.6.3-1.fc7 (2008-2815)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	medium

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2008-1614

high

Tenable Plugins

medium

medium

medium

medium