CERT-In Vulnerability Note CIVN-2010-55
Fedora Cronie Timestamp Race Condition Denial of service vulnerability

Original Issue Date: March 10, 2010

Severity Rating: Low

System Affected

• RedHat Fedora 12 &13
• cronie 1.4.3

Overview

A vulnerability has been reported in Fedora cronie which could be exploited by attacker to manipulate certain information and escalate privileges on the affected systems.

Description

Fedora Cronie is a job scheduler which contains the standard UNIX daemon crond that runs specified programs at scheduled times.

The edit_cmd function in crontab.c allows local users to change the modification times of arbitrary files via a symlink attack on a temporary file in the /tmp directory.

This allows a malicious users to manipulate timestamps leading to a denial of service vulnerability.

Solutions

• Update to latest version of Fedora cronie available at
  http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/cronie-1.4.4-1.fc13
• or Update the package using issue the yum utility "yum update cronie"

Vendor Information

RedHat
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=565809

References

RedHat
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=565809

Fedora Project
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2010-February/035762.html
http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/cronie-1.4.3-4.fc12
http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/cronie-1.4.4-1.fc13

Security Focus
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/38391

Secunia
http://secunia.com/advisories/38700/

Vupen
http://www.vupen.com/english/advisories/2010/0467

Disclaimer

The information provided herein is on "as is" basis, without warranty of any kind.

Contact Information

Phone: +91-11-24368572

Postal address

Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In)
Ministry of Communications and Information Technology
Electronics Niketan
6, C.G.O. Complex
New Delhi-110 003