GLSA 201201-15: ktsuss: Privilege escalation

http://security.gentoo.org/

Severity:	high
Title:	ktsuss: Privilege escalation
Date:	01/27/2012
Bugs:	#381115
ID:	201201-15

Synopsis

Two vulnerabilities have been found in ktsuss, allowing local attackers to gain escalated privileges.

Background

ktsuss is a simple, graphical version of su written in C and GTK+.

Affected packages

Package	Vulnerable	Unaffected	Architecture(s)
x11-misc/ktsuss	<= 1.4		All supported architectures

Description

Two vulnerabilities have been found in ktuss:

Under specific circumstances, ktsuss skips authentication and fails to change the effective UID back to the real UID (CVE-2011-2921).
The GTK interface spawned by the ktsuss binary is run as root (CVE-2011-2922).

Impact

A local attacker could gain escalated privileges and use the "GTK_MODULES" environment variable to possibly execute arbitrary code with root privileges.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

Gentoo discontinued support for ktsuss. We recommend that users unmerge ktsuss:

      # emerge --unmerge "x11-misc/ktsuss"

References

Availability

This GLSA and any updates to it are available for viewing at the Gentoo Security Website: http://security.gentoo.org/glsa/glsa-201201-15.xml

Concerns?

Security is a primary focus of Gentoo Linux and ensuring the confidentiality and security of our users machines is of utmost importance to us. Any security concerns should be addressed to security@gentoo.org or alternatively, you may file a bug at https://bugs.gentoo.org.