Title: Multiple Temporary File Monitoring Utility Vendor Stopped Process Vulnerabilities
Severity: MODERATE
Description:
Temporary file monitoring and cleaning utilities are commonplace on many UNIX systems. Popular tools are 'tmpwatch' and 'stmpclean'.
A weakness in the design of these tools has recently been published. During operation, some of these utilities delete temporary files that have not been accessed for a pre-specified amount of time. This is based on the access times stored in file inodes. This is an insecure design because the tools cannot determine whether the process that has created a temporary file has terminated or not. As a result, the state of processes which have not terminated may be corrupted or lost if their temporary files are deleted. In some circumstances, attackers can induce this condition by stopping a process with higher privileges (for example, setuid programs can be stopped with SIGSTOP).
The deletion of a process' temporary file may create exploitable conditions. For example, attackers may replace the deleted temporary file with a link or a file of their own if a process performs operations on the deleted temporary file using its filename.
One example follows:
Attackers may replace a deleted temporary file with a link to a target file, owned by the owner of the setuid target utility. The affected process may delete the file, potentially resulting in a loss of sensitive information.
Affected Products:
- Erik Troan tmpwatch 2.8.0
- Erik Troan tmpwatch 2.8.1
- Erik Troan tmpwatch 2.8.3
- Erik Troan tmpwatch 2.8.4
- RedHat Linux 7.2.0
- RedHat Linux 7.2.0 alpha
- RedHat Linux 7.2.0 i386
- RedHat Linux 7.2.0 ia64
- RedHat Linux 7.3.0
- RedHat Linux 7.3.0 i386
- RedHat Linux 8.0.0
- RedHat Linux 8.0.0 i386
- Stanislav Shalunov stmpclean 0.1.0
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