StarOffice temporary directory Vulnerability (/tmp/soffice.tmp)
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SUMMARY

StarOffice creates a temporary directory under /tmp with the name 
"soffice.tmp" and permissions 0777.  Those permissions allow attackers
to 
launch attacks ranging from reading other user's local files to planting 
Trojans that will be executed by the other users of StartOffice.

DETAILS

Vulnerable systems:
StarOffice 5.2

StarOffice creates a temporary directory in /tmp/soffice.tmp and 
explicitly sets access permissions to 0777.  Therefore, if user A were
to 
create a symbolic link to any file owned by user B, and if user B were
to 
run StarOffice, the target of the link will become 0777.  As a result,
if 
the directory containing this target is accessible by user A, he will
have 
complete control over the target file.  Some trivially exploitable 
scenarios here include:

  - Gaining access to sensitive files (e.g., encrypted files or those 
containing private keys)
  - Making user B's mail spool file world read/write-able
  - Linking to a shell start-up file (e.g., ~/.profile, ~/.bashrc, 
~/.cshrc etc.) which will become world read/write-able and hence can be 
modified to execute whatever user A wants next time user B logs in.

Note that there is no race condition here, the sym link just needs to be 
made before the victim runs StarOffice.  There is also no issue in 
guessing the temporary directory name - it is always "soffice.tmp".

Also, user B has is no indication that anything has gone wrong.  
StarOffice performs as usual while being attacked giving no error
message 
or such.

The only two restrictions that were found is that the target file must
be 
in a directory accessible by the attacker (otherwise its 0777 perms are 
not that useful) and the target must not have executable permission set. 

Impact:
The impact of this vulnerability is quite significant on any system that 
serves multiple users, since every user can gain control over other
user's 
accounts provided the targets use StartOffice.

Workaround:
A workaround is to create a symbolic link from /tmp/soffice.tmp to a 
directory inside the your home directory which is inaccessible to anyone 
but yourself. Doing this before running StarOffice would seem to protect 
against the vulnerability and this could be written into a simple shell 
script wrapper.

--
Eko Sulistiono
MIKRODATA & AntiVirus Media
Web: http://www.mikrodata.co.id/
WAP: http://www.mikrodata.co.id/wap/index.wml

This message contains no viruses. Guaranteed by AVP.


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