Caldera Systems releases updated 'man' package

______________________________________________________________________________
                   Caldera Systems, Inc.  Security Advisory

Subject:                buffer overflow in man
Advisory number:        CSSA-1999:025.0
Issue date:             1999 August, 27
Cross reference:
______________________________________________________________________________

1. Problem Description

There is a buffer overflow in man, the manual pager. As it is setgid to group man, a local user can obtain group man privilege by exploiting this hole.

2. Vulnerable Versions

Systems : COL 2.2
Packages: previous to /man-1.5f-5

3. Solutions

Workaround:

Disable the setgid bit on /usr/man/man:
chmod g-s /usr/man/man
This will stop any caching of formatted manual pages, but displaying manual pages will continue to work.

The proper solution is to upgrade to the latest packages

rpm -U man-1.5f-5.i386.rpm

4. Location of Fixed Packages

The upgrade packages can be found on Caldera's FTP site at:

ftp://ftp.calderasystems.com/pub/OpenLinux/updates/2.2/current/RPMS/

The corresponding source code package can be found at:

ftp://ftp.calderaystems.com/pub/OpenLinux/updates/2.2/current/SRPMS

5. Installing Fixed Packages

Upgrade the affected packages with the following commands:

rpm -U man-1.5f-5.i386.rpm

6. Verification

   77c77978a2031b0219532794572e3163  RPMS/man-1.5f-5.i386.rpm
   af2406b378c270d77a6529858f23218d  SRPMS/man-1.5f-5.src.rpm

7. References

This and other Caldera security resources are located at:

http://www.calderasystems.com/news/security/index.html

This security fix closes Caldera's internal Problem Report 5033

8. Disclaimer

Caldera Systems, Inc. is not responsible for the misuse of any of the information we provide on this website and/or through our security advisories. Our advisories are a service to our customers intended to promote secure installation and use of Caldera OpenLinux.