SuSE Security Announcement – aaa_base – UPDATE

Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 21:59:13 +0200 (MEST)
From: Marc Heuse marc@suse.de
Subject: [suse-security-announce] SuSE Security Announcement –
aaa_base – UPDATE

UPDATE INFORMATION

The original announcement pointed to update rpms which were old
and did *NOT* fix the vulnerabilities.

We apologize for this mistake.

---

SuSE Security Announcement

Package: aaabase < 2000.5.2
Date: Tue May 2 21:56:21 CEST 2000

Affected SuSE versions: all
Vulnerability Type: remove any local file(s) executing attacker
supplied commands as non-root
SuSE default package: yes
Other affected systems: unknown

---

A security hole was discovered in the package mentioned above.
Please update as soon as possible or disable the service if you are
using this software on your SuSE Linux installation(s).

Other Linux distributions or operating systems might be affected
as well, please contact your vendor for information about this
issue.

Please note that we provide this information on an “as-is” basis
only. There is no warranty whatsoever and no liability for any
direct, indirect or incidental damage arising from this information
or the installation of the update package.

---

1. Problem Description

aaa_base is the basic package which comes with any SuSE Linux
installation. Two vulnerabilities have been found:

1) The cron job /etc/cron.daily/aaa_base does a daily checking
of files in /tmp and /var/tmp, where old files will be deleted if
configured to do so. Please note this this feature is NOT activated
by default

2) Some system accounts have their homedirectories set to /tmp
by default. These are the users games, firewall, wwwrun and nobody
on a SuSE 6.4.

2. Impact

1) If the /tmp cleanup is activated, any file or directory can
be deleted by any local user

2) If an attacker creates dot files in /tmp (e.g. bash
profiles), these might be executed if someone uses e.g. “su –
nobody” to switch to the nobody user. This can lead to a compromise
of that userid. This vulnerability is present in several other unix
systems as well – please check all!

3. Solution

1) Update the package from our FTP server.

2) The root user will receive a email with the accounts listed
which have a homedirectory in /tmp. You have to fix this by hand,
because some installations might break if they rely on information
saved in the (unsafe) /tmp homedirectory. The email will give more
information what to do.

---

Please verify these md5 checksums of the updates before
installing: (for SuSE 6.0 please use the 6.1 update rpm)

a8204a4929c139e895f3357021647daa ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/axp/update/6.1/a1/aaa_base-2000.5.2-0.alpha.rpm 
5dee42bd0f531922d0b17d859f3d0d0d ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/axp/update/6.3/a1/aaa_base-2000.5.2-0.alpha.rpm 
da8c74f80983beecf23baa62eea45142 ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update/6.1/a1/aaa_base-2000.5.2-0.i386.rpm 
9618ec3ae63f4d80527a8e3b5f610fc1 ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update/6.2/a1/aaa_base-2000.5.2-0.i386.rpm 
db53e002b6be652b31262bf89be0c31a ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update/6.4/a1/aaa_base-2000.5.2-0.i386.rpm 
488eda289876ba3c14dbffb881dc8726 ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/ppc/update/6.3/a1/aaa_base-2000.5.2-0.ppc.rpm 

---

You can find updates on our ftp-Server:

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update
for Intel processors
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/axp/update
for Alpha processors
or try the following web pages for a list of mirrors:
http://www.suse.de/ftp.html
http://www.suse.com/ftp_new.html

Our webpage for patches:
http://www.suse.de/patches/index.html

Our webpage for security announcements:
http://www.suse.de/security

If you want to report vulnerabilities, please contact security@suse.de

---

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