-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- 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 ______________________________________________________________________________ SuSE has got two free security mailing list services to which any interested party may subscribe: suse-security@suse.com - moderated and for general/linux/SuSE security discussions. All SuSE security announcements are sent to this list. suse-security-announce@suse.com - SuSE's announce-only mailing list. Only SuSE's security annoucements are sent to this list. To subscribe to the list, send a message to: To remove your address from the list, send a message to: Send mail to the following for info and FAQ for this list: _____________________________________________________________________________ This information is provided freely to everyone interested and may be redistributed provided that it is not altered in any way. Type Bits/KeyID Date User ID pub 2048/3D25D3D9 1999/03/06 SuSE Security Team