Steven van Acker reported on bugtraq that the version of cfingerd (a configurable finger daemon) as distributed in Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 suffers from two problems: The code that reads configuration files (files in which $ commands are expanded) copied its input to a buffer without checking for a buffer overflow. When the ALLOW_LINE_PARSING feature is enabled that code is used for reading users' files as well, so local users could exploit this. There also was a printf call in the same routine that did not protect against printf format attacks. Since ALLOW_LINE_PARSING is enabled in the default /etc/cfingerd.conf local users could use this to gain root access. This has been fixed in version 1.4.1-1.2, and we recommend that you upgrade your cfingerd package immediately.
Since ALLOW_LINE_PARSING is enabled in the default /etc/cfingerd.conf local users could use this to gain root access.
This has been fixed in version 1.4.1-1.2, and we recommend that you upgrade your cfingerd package immediately.
MD5 checksums of the listed files are available in the original advisory.
Vulmon