1.84. libuser

Updated libuser packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5, and 6.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

The libuser library implements a standardized interface for manipulating and administering user and group accounts. Sample applications that are modeled after applications from the shadow password suite (shadow-utils) are included in these packages.

It was discovered that libuser did not set the password entry correctly when creating LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) users. If an administrator did not assign a password to an LDAP based user account, either at account creation with luseradd, or with lpasswd after account creation, an attacker could use this flaw to log into that account with a default password string that should have been rejected. (CVE-2011-0002)

Note: LDAP administrators that have used libuser tools to add users should check existing user accounts for plain text passwords, and reset them as necessary.

Users of libuser should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct this issue.