USN-278-1: gdm vulnerability
4 May 2006
gdm vulnerabilitiy
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
- Ubuntu 5.10
- Ubuntu 5.04
Software Description
Details
Marcus Meissner discovered a race condition in gdm’s handling of the ~/.ICEauthority file permissions. A local attacker could exploit this to become the owner of an arbitrary file in the system. When getting control over automatically executed scripts (like cron jobs), the attacker could eventually leverage this flaw to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges.
Update instructions
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
- Ubuntu 5.10
- gdm
- Ubuntu 5.04
- gdm
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.