RHSA-2006:0015 - Security Advisory

Topic

Updated initscripts packages that fix a privilege escalation issue and
several bugs are now available.

This update has been rated as having moderate security impact by the Red
Hat Security Response Team.

Description

The initscripts package contains the basic system scripts used to boot your
Red Hat system, change runlevels, and shut the system down cleanly.
Initscripts also contains the scripts that activate and deactivate most
network interfaces.

A bug was found in the way initscripts handled various environment
variables when the /sbin/service command is run. It is possible for a local
user with permissions to execute /sbin/service via sudo to execute
arbitrary commands as the 'root' user. The Common Vulnerabilities and
Exposures project assigned the name CVE-2005-3629 to this issue.

The following issues have also been fixed in this update:

• extraneous characters were logged on bootup.
• fsck would be attempted on filesystems marked with _netdev in rc.sysinit

before they were available.

Additionally, support for multi-core Itanium processors has been added to
redhat-support-check.

All users of initscripts should upgrade to these updated packages, which
contain backported patches to resolve these issues.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. To use Red Hat Network,
launch the Red Hat Update Agent with the following command:

up2date

This will start an interactive process that will result in the appropriate
RPMs being upgraded on your system.

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 3 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 3 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 3 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 3 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 3 s390
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 3 ppc

Fixes

• BZ - 169403 - Automount of the emcpower device fails if fsck is enabled for the device in /etc/fstab.
• BZ - 171198 - Bogus messages in system log (/var/log/messages)

CVEs

• CVE-2005-3629

References

(none)