vulnerability note CVE-2010-0301

maildrop: privilege elevation

Synthesis of the vulnerability

When emails are delivered with maildrop, a local attacker can acquire privileges of the root group.

Severity: 2/4. Creation date: 28/01/2010.

Description of the vulnerability

The maildrop program delivers local messages and filters them. This command is for example called by root:   maildrop -d user_who_receives_the_email The email recipient can then have a ~/.mailfilter file containing commands to execute, in order to filter the mail. The maildrop command looses root privileges, and acquires privileges of the user, before executing commands of the filtering file. However, additional groups are not limited to user's group. The root (0) additional group is therefore kept. When emails are delivered with maildrop, a local attacker can thus acquire privileges of the root group.

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Characteristics

Title: maildrop: privilege elevation. Keywords: elevation maildrop privilege user_who_receives_the_email. Identifiers: 564601, BID-37984, CVE-2010-0301, DSA 1981-1, DSA 1981-2, FEDORA-2010-1863, FEDORA-2010-1927, MDVSA-2010:038, VIGILANCE-VUL-9389.

Information sources

Publications and announces Source example: 564601 : possible problems when switching UID/GIDs in delivery mode when run as root

Solutions for this vulnerability

Patch or workaround

Supplements

Attack Exploit 0day or proof of concept

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