plymouth-pretrigger.sh in dracut and udev, when running on Fedora 13 and 14, sets weak permissions for the /dev/systty device file, which allows remote authenticated users to read terminal data from tty0 for local users.

It was discovered that /dev/systty device file created by dracut-generated initramfs scripts used an insecure file permissions.
This could possibly allow local user to snoop on other user's terminal.

Updated dracut no longer creates this file as device file, rather creates it a symbolic link to tty0 device file. However, for this change to take effect, user needs to re-generate initramfs (any initramfs for all kernels that are going to be booted in the future) using updated dracut version and reboot the system.

On Fedora 13, dracut update addressing this flaw was previously released as bug fix update. This update only provides updated udev packages that replace systty device file with a symlink on udev package upgrade and each udev start. This provides a work-around fix for users that fail to regenerate their initramfs and reboot as described above.

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.

It was discovered that /dev/systty device file created by dracut-generated initramfs scripts used an insecure file permissions.
This could possibly allow local user to snoop on other user's terminal.

Updated dracut no longer creates this file as device file, rather creates it a symbolic link to tty0 device file. However, for this change to take effect, user needs to re-generate initramfs (any initramfs for all kernels that are going to be booted in the future) using updated dracut version and reboot the system.

This update also provides updated udev packages that replace systty device file with a symlink on udev package upgrade and each udev start. This provides a work-around fix for users that fail to regenerate their initramfs and reboot as described above.

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
50972	Fedora 13 : udev-153-5.fc13 (2010-17912)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	medium
50814	Fedora 14 : dracut-006-5.fc14 / udev-161-7.fc14 (2010-17930)	Nessus	Fedora Local Security Checks	medium

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2010-4176

medium

Tenable Plugins

medium

medium