USN-308-1: shadow vulnerability

6 July 2006

shadow vulnerability

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Releases

Details

Ilja van Sprundel discovered that passwd, when called with the -f, -g,
or -s option, did not check the result of the setuid() call. On
systems that configure PAM limits for the maximum number of user
processes, a local attacker could exploit this to execute chfn,
gpasswd, or chsh with root privileges.

This does not affect the default configuration of Ubuntu.

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 6.06
  • passwd - 1:4.0.13-7ubuntu3.1
Ubuntu 5.10
  • passwd - 1:4.0.3-37ubuntu10
Ubuntu 5.04
  • passwd - 1:4.0.3-30.7ubuntu16.1

In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the
necessary changes.

References