Ubuntu 4.10 / 5.04 : gzip vulnerabilities (USN-116-1)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 20504

Synopsis

The remote Ubuntu host is missing a security-related patch.

Description

Imran Ghory discovered a race condition in the file permission restore code of gzip and gunzip. While a user was compressing or decompressing a file, a local attacker with write permissions in the directory of that file could replace the target file with a hard link. This would cause gzip to restore the file permissions to the hard link target instead of to the gzip output file, which could be exploited to gain read or even write access to files of other users. (CAN-2005-0988)

Ulf Harnhammar found a path traversal vulnerability when gunzip was used with the -N option. An attacker could exploit this to create files in an arbitrary directory with the permissions of a user if he tricked this user to decompress a specially crafted gzip file using the -N option (which can also happen in systems that automatically process uploaded gzip files). (CAN-2005-1228).

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.

Solution

Update the affected gzip package.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 20504

File Name: ubuntu_USN-116-1.nasl

Version: 1.15

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 1/15/2006

Updated: 1/19/2021

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.3

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 5

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:gzip, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:4.10, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:5.04

Required KB Items: Host/cpu, Host/Debian/dpkg-l, Host/Ubuntu, Host/Ubuntu/release

Patch Publication Date: 5/4/2005

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2005-0988, CVE-2005-1228

USN: 116-1