Alerts This Week
Warning Icon 1 525
Alerts This Week
Warning Icon 1 525

Debian DSA-428-1 Moderate: Risk of Slocate Heap Overflow Vulnerability

debian
Calendar Grey January 20, 2004
Debian Logo
Mitigate risks from a slocate heap overflow in Debian by updating to ensure local user privileges are controlled.
This vulnerability could grant a local attacker "slocate" group privileges, which can access the list of all file pathnames on the system.

Summary

A vulnerability was discovered in slocate, a program to index and
search for files, whereby a specially crafted database could overflow
a heap-based buffer. This vulnerability could be exploited by a local
attacker to gain the privileges of the "slocate" group, which can
access the global database containing a list of pathnames of all files
on the system, including those which should only be visible to
privileged users.

This problem, and a category of potential similar problems, have been
fixed by modifying slocate to drop privileges before reading a
user-supplied database.

For the current stable distribution (woody) this problem has been
fixed in version 2.6-1.3.2.

For the unstable distribution (sid) this problem will be fixed soon.
Refer to Debian bug #226103 for status information.

We recommend that you update your slocate package.

Upgrade Instructions
- --------------------

wget url
will fetch the file for you
dpkg -i file.deb
will install the referenced file.

If you are using the a...

Read the Full Advisory

Package: slocate

Get the latest News and Insights

Get the latest Linux and open source security news straight to your inbox.

Related News

Your message here