vcdiff in Emacs 20.7 to 22.1.50, when used with SCCS, allows local users to overwrite arbitrary files via a symlink attack on temporary files.

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed that are impacted by a vulnerability without a vendor supplied patch available.

  - vcdiff in Emacs 20.7 to 22.1.50, when used with SCCS, allows local users to overwrite arbitrary files via     a symlink attack on temporary files. (CVE-2008-1694)

Note that Nessus relies on the presence of the package as reported by the vendor.

Steve Grubb found that the vcdiff script in Emacs create temporary files insecurely when used with SCCS. A local user could exploit a race condition to create or overwrite files with the privileges of the user invoking the program (CVE-2008-1694).

The updated packages have been patched to correct this issue.

It was discovered that Emacs did not account for precision when formatting integers. If a user were tricked into opening a specially crafted file, an attacker could cause a denial of service or possibly other unspecified actions. This issue does not affect Ubuntu 8.04.
(CVE-2007-6109)

Steve Grubb discovered that the vcdiff script as included in Emacs created temporary files in an insecure way when used with SCCS. Local users could exploit a race condition to create or overwrite files with the privileges of the user invoking the program. (CVE-2008-1694).

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.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Type	Severity
217063	Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2008-1694	Nessus	Misc.	Local	critical
36539	Mandriva Linux Security Advisory : emacs (MDVSA-2008:096)	Nessus	Mandriva Local Security Checks	Local	medium
32187	Ubuntu 6.06 LTS / 7.04 / 7.10 / 8.04 LTS : emacs21, emacs22 vulnerabilities (USN-607-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	Local	critical

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2008-1694

medium

Tenable Plugins

critical

medium

critical