[ GLSA 200503-14 ] KDE dcopidlng: Insecure temporary file creation

[GLSA]

Gentoo Linux Security Advisory

Title: KDE dcopidlng: Insecure temporary file creation (GLSA 200503-14)
Severity: normal
Exploitable: local
Date: March 07, 2005
Bug(s): #81652
ID: 200503-14

Synopsis

The dcopidlng script is vulnerable to symlink attacks, potentially allowing a local user to overwrite arbitrary files.

Background

KDE is a feature-rich graphical desktop environment for Linux and Unix-like Operating Systems. DCOP is KDE's simple IPC/RPC mechanism. dcopidlng is a DCOP helper script.

Affected Packages

Package: kde-base/kdelibs
Vulnerable: < 3.3.2-r5
Unaffected: >= 3.3.2-r5
Unaffected: >= 3.2.3-r7 < 3.2.4
Architectures: All supported architectures


Description

Davide Madrisan has discovered that the dcopidlng script creates temporary files in a world-writable directory with predictable names.

Impact

A local attacker could create symbolic links in the temporary files directory, pointing to a valid file somewhere on the filesystem. When dcopidlng is executed, this would result in the file being overwritten with the rights of the user running the utility, which could be the root user.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All kdelibs users should upgrade to the latest version: