Abstract

Makefiles generated with imake use an insecure temporary file in /tmp

Technical Details

The issue is in the make target for generating the pre-formatted manual
page. This is for software using imake using NetBSD.cf for builds.

Malicious users can pre-generate symlinks to point to important files
(so they will be overwritten) and possibly cause a local denial of
service if the make process is run with elevated privileges.

On NetBSD, many pkgsrc packages built using imake are affected. For
example, building xvier, xmeter, transfig, tightvncviewer, xcolorsel,
magicpoint, fvwm1, xearth, xalarm, xmmix, and many others, use this make
target.

This issue has been reported to and corrected by X.org and XFree86.

Solutions and Workarounds

This issue affects only machines which build software using imake and
which also use the target to generate pre-formatted manual pages.
However, since no binary rebuilding is required in order to fix this
issue, it is recommended that all users upgrade their sources.

The following instructions describe how to update your source tree.

Source trees dated from before 2005-09-12 should be upgraded to
sources dated 2005-09-13 or later.

The following directories need to be updated from CVS:
xsrc/xfree/xc/config/cf/NetBSD.cf

To update from CVS:
# cd xsrc
# cvs update -d -P xfree/xc/config/cf/NetBSD.cf
# cp xfree/xc/config/cf/NetBSD.cf /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/config/NetBSD.cf

Thanks To

The issue was discovered and reported by Jeremy C. Reed.

Revision History

2005-10-31 Initial release

More Information
 
Advisories may be updated as new information becomes available.
The most recent version of this advisory (PGP signed) can be found at
 ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/security/advisories/NetBSD-SA2005-009.txt.asc

Information about NetBSD and NetBSD security can be found at
http://www.NetBSD.org/  and http://www.NetBSD.org/Security/ .

Copyright 2005, The NetBSD Foundation, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Redistribution permitted only in full, unmodified form.