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USN-5745-2: shadow regression

29 November 2022

USN-5745-1 introduced a regression in shadow.

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Details

USN-5745-1 fixed vulnerabilities in shadow. Unfortunately that update
introduced a regression that caused useradd to behave incorrectly in Ubuntu
14.04 ESM, Ubuntu 16.04 ESM, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This
update reverts the security fix pending further investigation.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Original advisory details:

Florian Weimer discovered that shadow was not properly copying and removing
user directory trees, which could lead to a race condition. A local attacker
could possibly use this issue to setup a symlink attack and alter or remove
directories without authorization.

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Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 20.04
Ubuntu 18.04
Ubuntu 16.04
Ubuntu 14.04

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

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