[ glsa 201709-11 ] gimps

[GLSA]

Gentoo Linux Security Advisory

Title: GIMPS: Root privilege escalation (GLSA 201709-11)
Severity: high
Exploitable: local
Date: 2017-09-17
Bug(s): #603408
ID: 201709-11

Synopsis

Gentoo's GIMPS ebuilds are vulnerable to privilege escalation due
to improper permissions. A local attacker could use it to gain root
privileges.


Background

GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, is a software capable
of find Mersenne Primes, which are used in cryptography. GIMPS is also
used for hardware testing.


Affected Packages

Package: sci-mathematics/gimps
Vulnerable: < 28.10-r1
Unaffected: >= 28.10-r1
Architectures: All supported architectures


Description

It was discovered that Gentoo’s default GIMPS installation suffered
from a privilege escalation vulnerability in the init script. This script
calls an unsafe “chown -R” command in checkconfig() function.


Impact

A local attacker who does not belong to the root group, but has the
ability to modify the /var/lib/gimps directory can escalate privileges to
the root group.


Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All GIMPS users should upgrade to the latest version: