Ubuntu Security Notice USN-2473-1
14th 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 version:
- 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.