Debian Security Advisory

DSA-022-1 exmh -- local insecure tempfile creation

Date Reported:

26 Jan 2001

Affected Packages:

exmh

Vulnerable:

Yes

Security database references:

In the Bugtraq database (at SecurityFocus): BugTraq ID 2327.
In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2001-0125.

More information:

Former versions of the exmh program used /tmp for storing temporary files. No checks were made to ensure that nobody placed a symlink with the same name in /tmp in the meantime and thus was vulnerable to a symlink attack. This could lead to a malicious local user being able to overwrite any file writable by the user executing exmh. Upstream developers have reported and fixed this. The exmh program now use /tmp/login unless TMPDIR or EXMHTMPDIR is set.

We recommend you upgrade your exmh packages immediately.

Fixed in:

Debian 2.2 (potato)

Source:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/source/exmh_2.1.1-1.1.diff.gz; http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/source/exmh_2.1.1-1.1.dsc; http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/source/exmh_2.1.1.orig.tar.gz
Architecture-independent component:: http://security.debian.org/dists/stable/updates/main/binary-all/exmh_2.1.1-1.1_all.deb