Ubuntu 4.10 : perl vulnerabilities (USN-72-1)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 20693

Synopsis

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

Description

Two exploitable vulnerabilities involving setuid-enabled perl scripts have been discovered. The package 'perl-suid' provides a wrapper around perl which allows to use setuid-root perl scripts, i.e.
user-callable Perl scripts which have full root privileges.

Previous versions allowed users to overwrite arbitrary files by setting the PERLIO_DEBUG environment variable and calling an arbitrary setuid-root perl script. The file that PERLIO_DEBUG points to was then overwritten by Perl debug messages. This did not allow precise control over the file content, but could destroy important data. PERLIO_DEBUG is now ignored for setuid scripts. (CAN-2005-0155)

In addition, calling a setuid-root perl script with a very long path caused a buffer overflow if PERLIO_DEBUG was set. This buffer overflow could be exploited to execute arbitrary files with full root privileges. (CAN-2005-0156).

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: 20693

File Name: ubuntu_USN-72-1.nasl

Version: 1.16

Type: local

Agent: unix

Published: 1/15/2006

Updated: 1/19/2021

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: High

Score: 8.9

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:libcgi-fast-perl, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:libperl-dev, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:libperl5.8, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:perl, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:perl-base, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:perl-debug, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:perl-doc, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:perl-modules, p-cpe:/a:canonical:ubuntu_linux:perl-suid, cpe:/o:canonical:ubuntu_linux:4.10

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

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 2/2/2005

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2005-0155, CVE-2005-0156

USN: 72-1