Attack vectors deja vu

I have to keep an eye on the IT security news. You know, “security is a process not product”. Just recently, Linux kernel vulnerability CVE-2009-1337 caught my attention. This even has l33t in its name 🙂 The more interesting part is, of course, not the CVE number but the attack vector used in a recent exploit. Basically, a core is dumped to the logrotate.d directory. After this, logrotate executes the malicious code included in this dump since it uses rather naive parsing to find instructions in its configuration files.

Inevitably, this reminded me of a very similar situation from few years ago. In 2006, CVE-2006-2451, which is another kernel vulnerability, allowed core to be dumped in a directory that the attacker isn’t allowed to write to. A weakness in cron.d parsing similar to that in recent versions of logrotate was used as attack vector.

Just a few weeks ago, I had another deja vu. There’s a flaw in udev versions before 1.4.1 that allows local users to gain root privileges by not checking whether a NETLINK message originates from kernel (CVE-2009-1185). It took me some time to remember why this sounded so familiar since the older case is from 2003. Back then, the zebra routing suite failed to check the NETLINK message originators (CVE-2003-0858).

Oh well, to err is human, don’t you think?