USN-959-1: PAM vulnerability

7 July 2010

Root privilege escalation via symlink following.

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Releases

Packages

  • pam - Pluggable Authentication Modules library

Details

Denis Excoffier discovered that the PAM MOTD module in Ubuntu did
not correctly handle path permissions when creating user file stamps.
A local attacker could exploit this to gain root privilieges.

Reduce your security exposure

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 9.10
Ubuntu 10.04

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

References

Related notices

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Further reading