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LOW

libuser: does not filter newline characters in the GECOS field

Published Aug 11, 2015

Description

Incomplete blacklist vulnerability in the chfn function in libuser before 0.56.13-8 and 0.60 before 0.60-7, as used in the userhelper program in the usermode package, allows local users to cause a denial of service (/etc/passwd corruption) via a newline character in the GECOS field.

Affected products

Remediation

Red Hat statement

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is now in Production 3 Phase of the support and maintenance life cycle. This vulnerability has been rated as having Moderate security impact and is not currently planned to be addressed in future updates. For additional information, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/.

Red Hat mitigation

Add pam_warn and pam_deny rules to /etc/pam.d/chfn and /etc/pam.d/chsh to prevent non-root users from using this functionality. With these edits, the files should contain: #%PAM-1.0 auth sufficient pam_rootok.so auth required pam_warn.so auth required pam_deny.so auth include system-auth account include system-auth password include system-auth session include system-auth Afterwards, attempts by unprivileged users to use chfn and chsh (and the respective functionality in the userhelper program) will fail, and will be logged (by default in /var/log/secure).

Metrics

References (13)

Change history (0)

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Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner redhat
Published Aug 11, 2015
Updated Aug 6, 2024
Reserved Apr 10, 2015
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Moderate
Public date Jul 23, 2015