Debian Security Advisory

modutils -- local exploit

Date Reported:

20 Nov 2000

Affected Packages:

modutils

Vulnerable:

Yes

Security database references:

In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2000-1095.

More information:

Sebastian Krahmer found a problem in the modprobe utility that could be exploited by local users to run arbitrary commands as root if the machine is running a kernel with kmod enabled.

The kmod kernel feature allows the kernel to dynamically load kernel modules if functionality is required that is not present in the running kernel. It does this by invoking the modprobe command with the requested module as parameter. This parameter can be influenced by users, for example by opening a currently non-existing files on a devfs filesystem, or trying to access a non-existing network interface. Since modprobe did not properly escape shell meta-characters when calling external commands or check if the last parameters was an option instead of a modulename, users can cause it to run arbitrary commands.

This has been fixed in version 2.3.11-12 and we recommend that you upgrade your modutils package immediately.

Fixed in:

Debian 2.2 (potato)

Source:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/source/modutils_2.3.11-12.diff.gz; http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/source/modutils_2.3.11-12.dsc; http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/source/modutils_2.3.11.orig.tar.gz
alpha:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-alpha/modutils_2.3.11-12_alpha.deb
arm:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-arm/modutils_2.3.11-12_arm.deb
i386:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-i386/modutils_2.3.11-12_i386.deb
m68k:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-m68k/modutils_2.3.11-12_m68k.deb
powerpc:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-powerpc/modutils_2.3.11-12_powerpc.deb
sparc:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-sparc/modutils_2.3.11-12_sparc.deb