EGI SVG Advisories

EGI CSIRT Alert glibc-2011-04-12

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EGI CSIRT ADVISORY [EGI-ADV-20110412]

Title:       HIGH risk glibc vulnerability - privilege escalation (CVE-2011-0536) [EGI-ADV-20110412]
Date:        April 12, 2011
Last update: April 12, 2011
URL:         https://advisories.egi.eu/CSIRT_Alerts/glibc-2011-04-12


* Introduction


A flaw has been found in the dynamic linker component of the GNU C library.
A local attacker could use this flaw to escalate their privileges via a setuid
or setgid program which is dynamically linked to a library with certain properties.

This vulnerability affects both RH5 and RH6 and their variants.

EGI CSIRT considers this to be a HIGH vulnerability for now and might raise it
to CRITICAL if a working exploit is made public



Details
=======

The fix for CVE-2010-3847 introduced a regression in the way the dynamic
loader expanded the $ORIGIN dynamic string token specified in the RPATH and
RUNPATH entries in the ELF library header. A local attacker could use this
flaw to escalate their privileges via a setuid or setgid program using
such a library. (CVE-2011-0536)

RH security team confirmed that reporter (of this vulnerability) indicated an
intention to make exploit public after waiting some time to give users and
downstream distros an opportunity to pick up the fix.


Mitigation
==========

The only known mitigation is to apply the security patch from the software vendor.


Recommendations
===============

It is STRONGLY recommanded to immediately apply vendor patches when they become available.

Vendor patches are now available from

* Ubuntu
* Debian
* RHEL5/6
* SL5/6

To be released:

* CentOS5/6


References
==========
RedHat bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2011-0536

RHEL5 update:
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-0412.html

RHEL6 update:
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-0413.html

SL5/6 update:
http://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1104&L=scientific-linux-errata&T=0&P=583

SLC5 update:
http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux/updates/updates-slc5.shtml

SLC6 update:
http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux/updates/updates-slc6.shtml

Debian update:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2011/msg00005.html

Ubuntu update:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/2011-January/001226.html