FreeBSD VuXML: Documenting security issues in FreeBSD and the FreeBSD Ports Collection

automake -- Insecure 'distcheck' recipe granted world-writable distdir

Affected packages
1.5.0 <= automake < 1.12.2

Details

VuXML ID 36235c38-e0a8-11e1-9f4d-002354ed89bc
Discovery 2012-07-09
Entry 2012-08-06
Modified 2012-08-25

GNU reports:

The recipe of the 'distcheck' target granted temporary world-write permissions on the extracted distdir. This introduced a locally exploitable race condition for those who run "make distcheck" with a non-restrictive umask (e.g., 022) in a directory that was accessible by others. A successful exploit would result in arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the user running "make distcheck".

It is important to stress that this vulnerability impacts not only the Automake package itself, but all packages with Automake-generated makefiles. For an effective fix it is necessary to regenerate the Makefile.in files with a fixed Automake version.

References

CVE Name CVE-2012-3386
URL https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2012-07/msg00023.html