USN-1284-1: Update Manager vulnerabilities

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-1284-1

28th November, 2011

update-manager vulnerabilities

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

  • Ubuntu 11.10
  • Ubuntu 11.04
  • Ubuntu 10.10
  • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
  • Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

Summary

Update Manager could be made to overwrite files as the administrator.

Software description

  • update-manager - GNOME application that manages apt updates
  • update-notifier - Daemon which notifies about package updates

Details

David Black discovered that Update Manager incorrectly extracted the
downloaded upgrade tarball before verifying its GPG signature. If a remote
attacker were able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack, this flaw could
potentially be used to replace arbitrary files. (CVE-2011-3152)

David Black discovered that Update Manager created a temporary directory
in an insecure fashion. A local attacker could possibly use this flaw to
read the XAUTHORITY file of the user performing the upgrade.
(CVE-2011-3154)

This update also adds a hotfix to Update Notifier to handle cases where the
upgrade is being performed from CD media.

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package version:

Ubuntu 11.10:
update-manager 1:0.152.25.5
Ubuntu 11.04:
update-notifier 0.111ubuntu2.1
update-manager 1:0.150.5.1
Ubuntu 10.10:
update-notifier 0.105ubuntu1.1
update-manager 1:0.142.23.1
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS:
auto-upgrade-tester 1:0.134.11.1
update-notifier 0.99.3ubuntu0.1
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS:
update-manager 1:0.87.31.1

To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

CVE-2011-3152, CVE-2011-3154