Debian Security Advisory

DSA-2770-1 torque -- authentication bypass

Date Reported:
09 Oct 2013
Affected Packages:
torque
Vulnerable:
Yes
Security database references:
In the Debian bugtracking system: Bug 722306.
In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2013-4319.
More information:

John Fitzpatrick of MWR InfoSecurity discovered an authentication bypass vulnerability in torque, a PBS-derived batch processing queueing system.

The torque authentication model revolves around the use of privileged ports. If a request is not made from a privileged port then it is assumed not to be trusted or authenticated. It was found that pbs_mom does not perform a check to ensure that connections are established from a privileged port.

A user who can run jobs or login to a node running pbs_server or pbs_mom can exploit this vulnerability to remotely execute code as root on the cluster by submitting a command directly to a pbs_mom daemon to queue and run a job.

For the oldstable distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in version 2.4.8+dfsg-9squeeze2.

For the stable distribution (wheezy), this problem has been fixed in version 2.4.16+dfsg-1+deb7u1.

For the unstable distribution (sid), this problem will be fixed soon.

We recommend that you upgrade your torque packages.