J-Security Center

Title: Multiple Vendor Amanda 'amandad' Symlink Vulnerability

Severity: MODERATE

Description:

Amanda is a popular file backup system used by several free UNIX distributions. Under certain versions of the distribution shipped with FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE the amanda daemon itself (amandad) is subject to a symlink vulnerability which could result in a denial of service attack.

This is caused because amandad during it's process of operations writes a debug file to the /tmp directory. This file (/tmp/amandad.debug) does not check for existing symlinked files of the same name. Amandad is not run SUID/SGID so the end result of this vulnerability would most likely be the ability to clobber other files owned by the UID which owns the amandad process. The output in this case cannot be tailored and consists of Amanda debug output.

This vulnerability may very well be present in other UNIX distributions. This entry will be updated as more information becomes available.

Affected Products:

  • FreeBSD FreeBSD 3.3.0

References:

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