Ubuntu 4.10 : ntp vulnerability (USN-175-1)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 20585

Synopsis

The remote Ubuntu host is missing one or more security-related patches.

Description

Thomas Biege discovered a flaw in the privilege dropping of the NTP server. When ntpd was configured to drop root privileges, and the group to run under was specified as a name (as opposed to a numeric group ID), ntpd changed to the wrong group. Depending on the actual group it changed to, this could either cause non-minimal privileges, or a malfunctioning ntp server if the group does not have the privileges that ntpd actually needs.

On Ubuntu 4.10, ntpd does not use privilege dropping by default, so you are only affected if you manually activated it. In Ubuntu 5.04, privilege dropping is used by default, but this bug is already fixed.

Note that Tenable Network Security has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory. Tenable has attempted to automatically clean and format it as much as possible without introducing additional issues.

Solution

Update the affected packages.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 20585

File Name: ubuntu_USN-175-1.nasl

Version: 1.15

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 1/15/2006

Updated: 1/19/2021

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.9

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.6

Vector: CVSS2#AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:ntp, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:ntp-doc, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:ntp-refclock, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:ntp-server, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:ntp-simple, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:ntpdate, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:4.10

Required KB Items: Host/cpu, Host/Debian/dpkg-l, Host/Ubuntu, Host/Ubuntu/release

Patch Publication Date: 9/1/2005

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2005-2496

USN: 175-1