Re: RH7.0: man local gid 15 (man) exploit

From: solarat_private
Date: Mon May 14 2001 - 18:00:28 PDT

  • Next message: Olaf Kirch: "Re: Vixie cron vulnerability"

    On Sun, May 13, 2001 at 08:07:34PM -0000, zenith parsec wrote:
    > man -S `perl -e 'print ":" x 100'`
    > 
    > Will cause a seg fault if you are vulnerable.
    
    This and several other man vulnerabilities have been discussed on
    security-audit last year.  See:
    
    MARC: thrd 'Multiple man vulnerabilities with Red Hat Linux 6.2'
    http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=97096128600001&w=2&r=1
    
    MARC: thrd 'More fun with man 1.5h1'
    http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=97135295400001&w=2&r=1
    
    I don't think your analysis of the possibilities to exploit this is
    entirely correct.  The buffer is in the bss, not on the heap.  In fact,
    the builds of man-1.5h1 I have here won't even segfault on the command
    you mention, not even when given 400 colons -- but they do misbehave in
    other ways.  (I am willing to believe that this really is exploitable
    on the RH 7.0 build, which I don't have.)
    
    Of course, this is just one reason why SGID man is bad.
    
    > GID man allows a race condition for root via
    > /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis and /sbin/makwhatis
    
    Yes, due to their security fix.  I haven't seen this mentioned before
    (but I'm not using this broken fix, anyway).
    
    -TMPFILE=$HOME/whatis$$
    -TMPFILEDIR=/tmp/whatis$$
    +TMPFILE=/var/cache/man/whatis$$
    +TMPFILEDIR=/var/cache/man/whatis$$
    
    where /var/cache/man is writable by group man. :-(
    
    The makewhatis patch we have in Owl (http://www.openwall.com/Owl/) is
    attached.
    
    The section list overflow bug you mention isn't a security problem on
    Owl for obvious reasons, but is on my TODO for fixing (has been there
    since the security-audit discussion).
    
    -- 
    /sd
    
    
    



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