Ubuntu Security Notice USN-308-1
6th July, 2006
shadow vulnerability
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
- Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
- Ubuntu 5.10
- Ubuntu 5.04
Details
Ilja van Sprundel discovered that passwd, when called with the -f, -g,
or -s option, did not check the result of the setuid() call. On
systems that configure PAM limits for the maximum number of user
processes, a local attacker could exploit this to execute chfn,
gpasswd, or chsh with root privileges.
This does not affect the default configuration of Ubuntu.
Update instructions
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package version:
- Ubuntu 6.06 LTS:
- passwd 1:4.0.13-7ubuntu3.1
- Ubuntu 5.10:
- passwd 1:4.0.3-37ubuntu10
- Ubuntu 5.04:
- passwd 1:4.0.3-30.7ubuntu16.1
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the
necessary changes.