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5.25. cifs-utils

An updated cifs-utils package that fixes one security issue, multiple bugs, and adds various enhancements is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having low security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) associated with each description below.
The cifs-utils package contains tools for mounting and managing shares on Linux using the SMB/CIFS protocol. The CIFS shares can be used as standard Linux file systems.

Security Fix

CVE-2012-1586
A file existence disclosure flaw was found in mount.cifs. If the tool was installed with the setuid bit set, a local attacker could use this flaw to determine the existence of files or directories in directories not accessible to the attacker.

Note

mount.cifs from the cifs-utils package distributed by Red Hat does not have the setuid bit set. We recommend that administrators do not manually set the setuid bit for mount.cifs.

Bug Fixes

BZ#769923
The cifs.mount(8) manual page was previously missing documentation for several mount options. With this update, the missing entries have been added to the manual page.
BZ#770004
Previously, the mount.cifs utility did not properly update the "/etc/mtab" system information file when remounting an existing CIFS mount. Consequently, mount.cifs created a duplicate entry of the existing mount entry. This update adds the del_mtab() function to cifs.mount, which ensures that the old mount entry is removed from "/etc/mtab" before adding the updated mount entry.
BZ#796463
The mount.cifs utility did not properly convert user and group names to numeric UIDs and GIDs. Therefore, when the "uid", "gid" or "cruid" mount options were specified with user or group names, CIFS shares were mounted with default values. This caused shares to be inaccessible to the intended users because UID and GID is set to "0" by default. With this update, user and group names are properly converted so that CIFS shares are now mounted with specified user and group ownership as expected.
BZ#805490
The cifs.upcall utility did not respect the "domain_realm" section in the "krb5.conf" file and worked only with the default domain. Consequently, an attempt to mount a CIFS share from a different than the default domain failed with the following error message:
mount error(126): Required key not available
This update modifies the underlying code so that cifs.upcall handles multiple Kerberos domains correctly and CIFS shares can now be mounted as expected in a multi-domain environment.

Enhancements

BZ#748756
The cifs.upcall utility previously always used the "/etc/krb5.conf" file regardless of whether the user had specified a custom Kerberos configuration file. This update adds the "--krb5conf" option to cifs.upcall allowing the administrator to specify an alternate krb5.conf file. For more information on this option, refer to the cifs.upcall(8) manual page.
BZ#748757
The cifs.upcall utility did not optimally determine the correct service principal name (SPN) used for Kerberos authentication, which occasionally caused krb5 authentication to fail when mounting a server's unqualified domain name. This update improves cifs.upcall so that the method used to determine the SPN is now more versatile.
BZ#806337
This update adds the "backupuid" and "backupgid" mount options to the mount.cifs utility. When specified, these options grant a user or a group the right to access files with the backup intent. For more information on these options, refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page.
All users of cifs-utils are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which contains backported patches to fix these issues and add these enhancements.