Advisories, March 29, 2006

http://security.gentoo.org/

Severity: Normal
Title: bsd-games: Local privilege escalation in tetris-bsd
Date: March 29, 2006
Bugs: #122399
ID: 200603-26

Synopsis

tetris-bsd is prone to local privilege escalation vulnerabilities.

Background

bsd-games is a collection of NetBSD games ported to Linux.

Affected packages

     Package               /  Vulnerable  /                 Unaffected

  1  games-misc/bsd-games      < 2.17-r1                    >= 2.17-r1

Description

Tavis Ormandy of the Gentoo Linux Security Audit Team discovered that the checkscores() function in scores.c reads in the data from the /var/games/tetris-bsd.scores file without validation, rendering it vulnerable to buffer overflows and incompatible with the system used for managing games on Gentoo Linux. As a result, it cannot be played securely on systems with multiple users. Please note that this is probably a Gentoo-specific issue.

Impact

A local user who is a member of group "games" may be able to modify the tetris-bsd.scores file to trigger the execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of other players.

Workaround

Do not add untrusted users to the "games" group.

Resolution

All bsd-games users are advised to update to the latest version:

    # emerge --sync
    # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=games-misc/bsd-games-2.17-r1"

Availability

This GLSA and any updates to it are available for viewing at the Gentoo Security Website:

http://security.gentoo.org/glsa/glsa-200603-26.xml

Concerns?

Security is a primary focus of Gentoo Linux and ensuring the confidentiality and security of our users machines is of utmost importance to us. Any security concerns should be addressed to security@gentoo.org or alternatively, you may file a bug at http://bugs.gentoo.org.

License

Copyright 2006 Gentoo Foundation, Inc; referenced text belongs to its owner(s).

The contents of this document are licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution / Share Alike license.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0