Re: [ GLSA 200903-18 ] Openswan: Insecure temporary file creation
On Mon, 9 Mar 2009, Robert Buchholz wrote:
Subject: [ GLSA 200903-18 ] Openswan: Insecure temporary file creation
Once again, thanks to everyone for not contacting the Openswan Project
in this matter just like they did not do this 6 months ago when this
"vulnerability" came out originally.
Severity: Normal
Title: Openswan: Insecure temporary file creation
Date: March 09, 2009
Bugs: #238574
ID: 200903-18
An insecure temporary file usage has been reported in Openswan,
allowing for symlink attacks.
Dmitry E. Oboukhov reported that the IPSEC livetest tool does not
handle the ipseclive.conn and ipsec.olts.remote.log temporary files
securely.
A local attacker could perform symlink attacks to execute arbitrary
code and overwrite arbitrary files with the privileges of the user
running the application.
The ipsec livetest command was never called or used by anything in
openswan as it was not finished. Furthermore, it was no longer
installed AND explicitely disabled since:
commit 4661d345b676d5412a52b6d1289568fc4ab31eac
Author: Paul Wouters <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri Nov 21 23:52:38 2008 -0600
Skip installing livetest
when we added:
$ head -5 programs/livetest/livetest.in
#!/bin/sh
echo "currently not used"
exit
Workaround
==========
There is no known workaround at this time.
The ipsec livetest is not even used by anything within the openswan
software. It is never called. No parts of openswan are called without
root privs. This whole thing is moot. Please bury it. Or just remove
the install of the livetest command in your build environment.
Or just ship a newer version of openswanm like 2.6.20 instead of the
latest "vulnerable" version in 2.6.16.
Resolution
==========
All Openswan users should upgrade to the latest version:
# emerge --sync
# emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=net-misc/openswan-2.4.13-r2"
Ahh. gentoo still uses the openswan-2.4.x version which has been EOL since
early 2008.
Also note that to problematic use was in wget -O. Perhaps one should talk
to the wget people about symlink attack in their code instead?
Paul