Title: PulseAudio Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Severity: MODERATE
Description:
PulseAudio is a sound server available for various platforms.
PulseAudio is prone to a local privilege-escalation vulnerability that stems from a design error. This vulnerability occurs because the application fails to properly ensure that it has dropped its privileges. Specifically, the application fails to check the return values of the 'setuid()' function in the 'daemon/caps.c' code file. The function is used to gain and drop privileges. Attackers could potentially trigger this issue by making the function call fail (e.g. by exhausting system resources).
Exploiting this issue could allow attackers to perform certain actions with superuser privileges.
This vulnerability affects versions prior to PulseAudio 0.9.9.
Affected Products:
- Debian Linux 4.0
- Debian Linux 4.0 alpha
- Debian Linux 4.0 amd64
- Debian Linux 4.0 arm
- Debian Linux 4.0 hppa
- Debian Linux 4.0 ia-32
- Debian Linux 4.0 ia-64
- Debian Linux 4.0 m68k
- Debian Linux 4.0 mips
- Debian Linux 4.0 mipsel
- Debian Linux 4.0 powerpc
- Debian Linux 4.0 s/390
- Debian Linux 4.0 sparc
- Gentoo Linux
- MandrakeSoft Linux Mandrake 2007.1
- MandrakeSoft Linux Mandrake 2007.1 x86_64
- MandrakeSoft Linux Mandrake 2008.0
- MandrakeSoft Linux Mandrake 2008.0 x86_64
- PulseAudio PulseAudio 0.9.5
- PulseAudio PulseAudio 0.9.6
- PulseAudio PulseAudio 0.9.8
- RedHat Fedora 7
- RedHat Fedora 8
- Ubuntu Ubuntu Linux 7.04 amd64
- Ubuntu Ubuntu Linux 7.04 i386
- Ubuntu Ubuntu Linux 7.04 powerpc
- Ubuntu Ubuntu Linux 7.04 sparc
- Ubuntu Ubuntu Linux 7.10 amd64
- Ubuntu Ubuntu Linux 7.10 i386
- Ubuntu Ubuntu Linux 7.10 powerpc
- Ubuntu Ubuntu Linux 7.10 sparc
References:
- Lennart Poettering: [pulseaudio-discuss] [ANNOUNCE] PulseAudio 0.9.9
- PulseAudio: PulseAudio Changeset 2100
- PulseAudio: PulseAudio Homepage
- SuSE: Bug 347822 - AUDIT-0: PulseAudio permissions
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