coreutils vulnerabilities

Related Vulnerabilities: CVE-2009-4135   CVE-2014-9471  

date and touch could be made to crash or run programs if they handled specially crafted input.

It was discovered that the distcheck rule in dist-check.mk in GNU coreutils allows local users to gain privileges via a symlink attack on a directory tree under /tmp. This issue only affected Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. (CVE-2009-4135)

14 January 2015

coreutils vulnerabilities

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

  • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Summary

date and touch could be made to crash or run programs if they handled specially crafted input.

Software Description

  • coreutils - GNU core utilities

Details

It was discovered that the distcheck rule in dist-check.mk in GNU coreutils allows local users to gain privileges via a symlink attack on a directory tree under /tmp. This issue only affected Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. (CVE-2009-4135)

Bertrand Jacquin and Fiedler Roman discovered date and touch incorrectly handled user-supplied input. An attacker could possibly use this to cause a denial of service or potentially execute code. (CVE-2014-9471)

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
coreutils - 8.21-1ubuntu5.1
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
coreutils - 8.13-3ubuntu3.3
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
coreutils - 7.4-2ubuntu3.1

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.

References