Caldera Security Advisory SA-1998.37: SUID bits on KDE Screensavers

Topic: SUID bits on KDE Screensavers
Advisory issue date: 25 November 1998

I. Problem Description

KDE Screensavers are usually running SUID root. Security issues
have been posted to Bugtraq on Nov 16 1998, under the subject “KDE
1.0’s klock can be used to gain root priveledges”. The KDE team has
now published a fix for the KDE1.0 branch and the current
branch.

With this change, screensavers and klock are not running SUID
anymore. This will solve every potential exploit, like misuse of
buffer overruns to gain root rights or executing a wrong executable
under SUID rights.

The following text explains the technique used to solve the
problem. An advisory for distributors, users and administrators
follows the technical description.

Technique
———
An authentification program, kcheckpass, has been introduced. This
is a separate, helper program, that runs SUID and is called each
time a password has to be checked. The password is passed via STDIN
to the program and the result of the authentification process is
returned in the return code of the program. This program is small
and supposed to be free from security hazzles.

Advisory
——–
Administrators should remove any SUID bit from KDE executables.

After updating to the fixed KDE1.0 tree or to the current KDE,
administrators should:

1. check the access rights of the installed executables. The
   screensavers must not be installed SUID anymore. If in doubt,
   remove the SUID bits manually by a suitable command, like “chmod -s
   *.kss klock” under Linux.
2. check the access rights of the kcheckpass program. This program
   should only be installed SUID root under certain authentification
   systems, like the shadow password suite.
3. Distributions using the shadow password system can be made more
   secure by creating a “shadow” group and setting the access rights
   of /etc/shadow and kcheckpass like in the following example:

 -rw-r-----   1 root     shadow        746 Sep  2 21:35 /etc/shadow
 -rwxr-sr-x   1 root     shadow       4720 Nov 17 22:32 /opt/kde/bin/kcheckpass

Distributors are strongly encouraged to follow this scheme. This
way, the kcheckpass is running under the effective user id of the
user itself and the effective group “shadow”. With this, kcheckpass
has only one additional right against regular users: The right to
read /etc/shadow. Attackers won’t be able to make wider use of
“kcheckpass”.

Availability of the fix
———————–
The patches are already integrated in the KDE1.0 and the KDE1.1
branches. You can use cvs/cvsup to get current sources. You can
also get the patch from KDE’s ftp Server ftp://ftp.kde.org and its mirrors, which
you can apply against a clean KDE1.0 kdebase package. It has been
uploaded under the name kdebase1.0-klock-patch and should show up
soon on a suitable place on KDE’s ftp Server. The precise location
will be announced later, for example http://www.kde.org/news_dyn.html
will provide this information as soon as it available.

Christian Esken <esken@kde.org>

II. Impact

Description:

klock can be used to gain root priviledges.

Vulnerable Systems:

OpenLinux 1.2 & 1.3 systems using a kdebase package prior to
kdebase-1.0-2.

III. Solution

Workaround:

Correction:

The proper solution is to upgrade to the kdebase-1.0-2
packages.

They can be found on Caldera’s FTP site at: ftp://ftp.caldera.com/pub/OpenLinux/updates/1.3/008/RPMS

The corresponding source code can be found at: ftp://ftp.caldera.com/pub/OpenLinux/updates/1.3/008/SRPMS

The MD5 checksums (from the “md5sum” command) for these packages
are:

        5bbf9ec5049207acdcf46178e140ac6c  RPMS/kdebase-1.0-2.i386.rpm
        05325756f0fc31a922367a0da57d6045  SRPMS/kdebase-1.0-2.src.rpm

Upgrade with the following commands:

rpm -q kdebase && rpm -U kdebase-1.0-2.i386.rpm

For each user the ownership of the *.kssrc files must be
changed. These files are most likely owned by “root.users” and
hence cannot be edited by users until the system administrator
(root) returns ownership to the respective user.

E.g.:

# chown col.users ~col/.kde/share/config/*.kssrc

IV. References

This and other Caldera security resources are located at:
http://www.caldera.com/news/security/index.html

Additional documentation on this problem can be found in:
http://www.geek-girl.com/bugtraq/1998_4/0503.html

This security fix closes Caldera’s internal Problem Report
4229.