RHEL 5 : pam (RHSA-2010:0819)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 50447

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Synopsis

The remote Red Hat host is missing one or more security updates.

Description

Updated pam packages that fix three security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.

Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) provide a system whereby administrators can set up authentication policies without having to recompile programs that handle authentication.

It was discovered that the pam_namespace module executed the external script namespace.init with an unchanged environment inherited from an application calling PAM. In cases where such an environment was untrusted (for example, when pam_namespace was configured for setuid applications such as su or sudo), a local, unprivileged user could possibly use this flaw to escalate their privileges. (CVE-2010-3853)

It was discovered that the pam_mail module used root privileges while accessing users' files. In certain configurations, a local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to obtain limited information about files or directories that they do not have access to.
(CVE-2010-3435)

It was discovered that the pam_xauth module did not verify the return values of the setuid() and setgid() system calls. A local, unprivileged user could use this flaw to execute the xauth command with root privileges and make it read an arbitrary input file.
(CVE-2010-3316)

Red Hat would like to thank Sebastian Krahmer of the SuSE Security Team for reporting the CVE-2010-3435 issue.

All pam users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues.

Solution

Update the affected pam and / or pam-devel packages.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 50447

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2010-0819.nasl

Version: 1.20

Type: Local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 11/2/2010

Updated: 1/14/2021

Supported Sensors: Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Nessus Agent, Tenable Cloud Security, Tenable Self-Hosted Container Security, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5

Percentile: 95.09

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.9

Temporal Score: 5.1

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

Vulnerability Information

CPE: cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:5, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:pam, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:pam-devel

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/cpu

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 11/1/2010

Vulnerability Publication Date: 1/24/2011

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2010-3316, CVE-2010-3435, CVE-2010-3853, CVE-2010-4707

BID: 42472, 43487

RHSA: 2010:0819

Detections

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