Puppet could be made to overwrite files and run programs with administrator privileges.
It was discovered that Puppet did not drop privileges when executing commands as different users. If an attacker had control of the execution manifests or the executed command, this could be used to execute code with elevated group permissions (typically root). (CVE-2012-1053)
23 February 2012
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Puppet could be made to overwrite files and run programs with administrator privileges.
It was discovered that Puppet did not drop privileges when executing commands as different users. If an attacker had control of the execution manifests or the executed command, this could be used to execute code with elevated group permissions (typically root). (CVE-2012-1053)
It was discovered that Puppet unsafely opened files when the k5login type is used to manage files. A local attacker could exploit this to overwrite arbitrary files and escalate privileges. (CVE-2012-1054)
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.