-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- __________________________________________________________ The U.S. Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability ___ __ __ _ ___ / | /_\ / \___ __|__ / \ \___ __________________________________________________________ INFORMATION BULLETIN HP-UX vuefile, vuepad, dtfile, & dtpad Vulnerabilities September 9, 1997 22:00 GMT Number H-105 ______________________________________________________________________________ PROBLEM: Users can inadvertently allow access to their accounts by running vuefile, vuepad, dtfile, or dtpad to displays they do not control. PLATFORM: HP9000 Series 700/800s running HP-UX releases 9.X and 10.X. DAMAGE: May allow unauthorized users to gain root privileges. SOLUTION: Inform users they should never run vuefile, vuepad, dtfile, or dtpad while su'd to another account. They also should never run these programs with the display directed to another Xserver unless they are logged into that Xserver in the same account. ______________________________________________________________________________ VULNERABILITY The information in the following Security Advisory should be ASSESSMENT: acted upon as soon as possible. Hewlett Packard will not be liable for any consequences to any customer resulting from customer's failure to fully implement instructions in this Security Advisory as soon as possible. ______________________________________________________________________________ [ Start Hewlett-Packard Advisory ] Document ID: HPSBUX9709-069 Date Loaded: 970909 Title: Security Advisory in vuefile, vuepad, et. al. in HP-UX - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- HEWLETT-PACKARD SECURITY ADVISORY: #00069, 08 September 1997 - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- The information in the following Security Advisory should be acted upon as soon as possible. Hewlett Packard will not be liable for any consequences to any customer resulting from customer's failure to fully implement instructions in this Security Advisory as soon as possible. - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- PROBLEM: Users can inadvertently allow access to their accounts by running vuefile, vuepad, dtfile, or dtpad to displays they do not control. PLATFORM: HP9000 Series 700/800s running HP-UX releases 9.X and 10.X DAMAGE: Users can gain privileges. SOLUTION: Do not run vuefile, vuepad, dtfile, or dtpad while su'd to another account. Also do not run them with the display set to another Xserver, unless the same account is logged in at each Xserver. AVAILABILITY: Not applicable - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- I. A. Background Vuefile, vuepad, dtfile, and dtpad do not authenticate users. Care must be taken to insure that only one user per Xserver runs these programs. B. Fixing the problem The current and perhaps only solution is to avoid the situation. This advisory will be updated if patches become available. C. Recommended solution Inform users so that they can avoid the situation. They should never run vuefile, vuepad, dtfile, or dtpad while su'd to another account. They also should never run these programs with the display directed to another Xserver unless they are logged into that Xserver in the same account. One way to make it more difficult for a user to su and run these programs is to enable per user authorization. This eliminates the potential for a user to run the programs on the wrong display by accidentally mistyping the display name. Per-user authorization is the default in CDE. In Vue, it can be enabled in /usr/vue/config/Xconfig: # To enable R4 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 per-user authorization. # Vuelogin*authorize: True Note that if per-user authorization is not enabled many security breaches are possible. For example, it is possible for a program to capture keystrokes typed on the Xserver. The root user can circumvent the per-user authorization and non-root users can give the Xauthority away. So all users still must be aware not to run vuefile, vuepad, dtfile, or dtpad as described above. D. To subscribe to automatically receive future NEW HP Security Bulletins from the HP Electronic Support Center via electronic mail, do the following: Use your browser to get to the HP Electronic Support Center page at: http://us-support.external.hp.com (for US, Canada, Asia-Pacific, & Latin-America) http://europe-support.external.hp.com (for Europe) Click on the Technical Knowledge Database, register as a user (remember to save the User ID assigned to you, and your password), and it will connect to a HP Search Technical Knowledge DB page. Near the bottom is a hyperlink to our Security Bulletin archive. Once in the archive there is another link to our current security patch matrix. Updated daily, this matrix is categorized by platform/OS release, and by bulletin topic. E. To report new security vulnerabilities, send email to security-alert@hp.com Please encrypt any exploit information using the security-alert PGP key, available from your local key server, or by sending a message with a -subject- (not body) of 'get key' (no quotes) to security-alert@hp.com. Permission is granted for copying and circulating this Bulletin to Hewlett-Packard (HP) customers (or the Internet community) for the purpose of alerting them to problems, if and only if, the Bulletin is not edited or changed in any way, is attributed to HP, and provided such reproduction and/or distribution is performed for non-commercial purposes. Any other use of this information is prohibited. HP is not liable for any misuse of this information by any third party. ________________________________________________________________________ - -----End of Document ID: HPSBUX9709-069-------------------------------------- [ End Hewlett-Packard Advisory ] ______________________________________________________________________________ CIAC wishes to acknowledge the contributions of Hewlett-Packard for the information contained in this bulletin. ______________________________________________________________________________ CIAC, the Computer Incident Advisory Capability, is the computer security incident response team for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the emergency backup response team for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). CIAC is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. 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World Wide Web: http://ciac.llnl.gov/ Anonymous FTP: ciac.llnl.gov (198.128.39.53) Modem access: +1 (510) 423-4753 (28.8K baud) +1 (510) 423-3331 (28.8K baud) CIAC has several self-subscribing mailing lists for electronic publications: 1. CIAC-BULLETIN for Advisories, highest priority - time critical information and Bulletins, important computer security information; 2. CIAC-NOTES for Notes, a collection of computer security articles; 3. SPI-ANNOUNCE for official news about Security Profile Inspector (SPI) software updates, new features, distribution and availability; 4. SPI-NOTES, for discussion of problems and solutions regarding the use of SPI products. Our mailing lists are managed by a public domain software package called Majordomo, which ignores E-mail header subject lines. 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If you are not part of these communities, please contact your agency's response team to report incidents. Your agency's team will coordinate with CIAC. The Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) is a world-wide organization. A list of FIRST member organizations and their constituencies can be obtained via WWW at http://www.first.org/. This document was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government. Neither the United States Government nor the University of California nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial products, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation or favoring by the United States Government or the University of California. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or the University of California, and shall not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes. LAST 10 CIAC BULLETINS ISSUED (Previous bulletins available from CIAC) H-96: Vulnerability in Bind H-92a: HP-UX X11/Motif Lib and Novell Netware Vulnerabilities H-97: SGI IRIX ftpd Signal Handling Vulnerability H-98: SunOS automounter Vulnerability H-99: SunOS, Solaris ifconfig ioctls Vulnerability H-100: SunOS, Solaris libXt Vulnerability H-101: FreeBSD procfs Vulnerability H-102: SGI IRIX webdist.cgi, handler and wrap programs Vulnerabilities H-103: HP-UX X11/Motif Libraries Vulnerability H-104: HP-UX libXt Vulnerability -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 4.0 Business Edition iQCVAwUBNBcqFrnzJzdsy3QZAQF1cQQAo6dr0ohyeqIDvFxdfuCRe6boFWLi+vp0 xWscSBiDTpxvXQ1NaJbvFGCew1nMx7Ey8CW6X1sazTtmjVTFfQ7u+IcI/5Moakg2 7S8xT35/59wF/UoNo5Agh7fUHygAYoanLyh1FM1RzSzjs4VMcoacKGqUcg0oEMs3 T4zRcjBpcNA= =m7hS -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----