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Home >> Browse Vulnerability Assessment Database >> Debian Local Security Checks >> [DSA056] DSA-056-1 man-db

Vulnerability Assessment Details

[DSA056] DSA-056-1 man-db

Vulnerability Assessment Summary
DSA-056-1 man-db

Detailed Explanation for this Vulnerability Assessment

Ethan Benson found a bug in man-db packages as distributed in
Debian GNU/Linux 2.2. man-db includes a mandb tool which is used to
build an index of the manual pages installed on a system. When the -u or
-c option were given on the command-line to tell it to write its database
to a different location it failed to properly drop rights before
creating a temporary file. This makes it possible for a possible hacker to do
a standard symlink attack to trick mandb into overwriting any file that
is writable by uid man, which includes the man and mandb binaries.

This has been fixed in version 2.3.16-3, and we recommend that you
upgrade your man-db package immediately. If you use suidmanager
you can also use that to make sure man and mandb are not installed
suid which protects you from this problem. This can be done with the
following commands:

suidregister /usr/lib/man-db/man root root 0755
suidregister /usr/lib/man-db/mandb root root 0755

Of course even when using suidmanager an upgrade is still strongly
recommended.

Solution : http://www.debian.org/security/2001/dsa-056
Network Security Threat Level: High

Networks Security ID: 2720

Vulnerability Assessment Copyright: This script is (C) 2005 Michel Arboi

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